PandaScore, the Paris based technology company, has just announced a $2.8m (£2.1m) seed round led by Alven Capital.

The aim of this funding round is to further develop and expand the company’s esports focus, grow the company and ’empower partnerships with bookmakers to enable real-time esports betting’.

In addition to Alven Capital, notable investors include Global Founders Capital, Julien Lemoine the CTO at Algolia, John Maloney (former CEO at Tumblr) and more.

Leveraging data in esports is a hot topic right now and there are a number of companies looking into this vast opportunity. PandaScore is looking to position itself by ‘feeding data to the ecosystem and bringing more professionalism, better content and real-time betting’.

Flavien Guillocheau, CEO at PandaScore commented: “Our advanced artificial intelligence understands what game is playing, which teams are participating, which players are involved, and can extract all the actions, items and scores in real-time.

“PandaScore collects hundreds of data points on thousands of games per month. We think Deep Learning make esports analysis possible, but we won’t stop there. If we can analyse FIFA we can scale to real football and traditional sports.”

PandaScore already has impressive esports partners on board in the form of PSG Esports and PMU eSport. The company’s software collects live statistics from video streams and disseminates all the data through their API. PandaScore’s API has recently started an open Beta phase that is planned for a roll-out this summer and then a full launch by the end of the year. Detailed statistics, schedules and live feed on League of Legends, DOTA2, Hearthstone, FIFA, and shortly Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Overwatch are to be made available.

Hadrien “Duke” Forestier, Coach at Paris Saint-Germain eSports said of their use of the API: “Throughout the season, PandaScore assists us with their expert knowledge in our preparation for matches. Furthermore, their ability to adapt quickly to the competitive scene changes benefits us as they are always able to provide first-class customer service. Our one-year long partnership with PandaScore was the establishment of a promising strategy to gain insights from data.”

PandaScore was founded by Flavien Guillocheau and Jonathan Retterer in 2015. They developed the algorithms which became, and remain, the core asset of the company. These allow for live data collection in hundreds of milliseconds by analysing live video streams on Twitch, Youtube or any streaming platform. With this latest round of funding, the target for the company now is to reach new markets and offer statistics across all esports titles.

The company is understandably looking to leverage its data and focus on the online betting market, and it plans to start with one of the most established in the world; the UK. PandaScore will be expanding its team of data scientists to support its offers of lives stats on all the key esports titles.

François Meteyer, Principal at Alven Capital noted: “We are thrilled to help PandaScore’s founders scale their unique technology and enable real-time knowledge, prediction and new monetization services on this booming market. We are convinced this solution is a strong building block for a modern esports data infrastructure, that will also open new perspectives for traditional sport market in the mid term.”

Esports Insider says: There are vast commercial opportunities with data in esports right now which is why everybody wants to get their hands on it. PandaScore is making the logical first move of focusing on the regulated betting market, but with the reported potential of its API across traditional sports too it’s no surprise it saw such a sizable investment round.