Today marks one year since I joined Genius Sports as Chief Technology Officer. Six months ago, I wrote about finding rhythm and perspective. A year in, the view is different, the cadence is faster, and the work is clearer: build the platform that connects every moment in sport to the people who love it. I am deeply grateful for the chance to build with so many brilliant minds and passionate colleagues who care about improving sport.

It has been an action-packed first year at Genius Sports, and we are only getting started.

New spaces for innovation

Chelsea New York NY

We opened our office in Chelsea, bringing technology, product, commercial, and people teams into one collaborative hub that overlooks the High Line. The space is designed for high-bandwidth collaboration and quiet focus. Being in Chelsea keeps us close to our tech partners and the creative energy of New York. It is also the home of our advertising technology platform and several of our data platform teams.

Lausanne Switzerland

We opened a new office in Lausanne focused on AI and computer vision. The team there is scaling model development and evaluation, along with the data pipelines that feed our officiating, tracking, and media products. Lausanne sits at the intersection of elite sport and research, which helps us pair quickly with clubs and federations across Europe and shorten iteration cycles. It is home to some of the most brilliant engineers I have worked with, tackling cutting-edge AI and computer vision use cases that move from lab to live environments quickly.

Los Angeles office

Today we opened our new Los Angeles office in Century City. LA is central to our video, on-prem capture, and media innovation work, and this space is purpose-built for our growing data platform and video augmentation initiatives. Expect a lot of experimentation here, from augmented broadcasts to short-form content.

Shipping for the game

Semi-automated Offside Technology (SAOT) in the Premier League

This year we helped deliver SAOT to the Premier League. The system combines optical tracking and real-time models to cut decision time and improve consistency, and it produces clear visualizations for broadcasts and in-stadium screens. When technology disappears into trust, sport gets better.

Bringing teams together

We welcomed Advertising Technology, Professional Services, and Sports Innovation Lab into one Genius Sports Tech organization. Unifying these teams around one platform shortens the path from a moment on the field to the fan who cares about it, and it brings our market and engineering teams into tighter feedback loops.

As part of this, we acquired Sports Innovation Lab. Their deterministic Fluid Fan Graph and fan intelligence products combine with our official data footprint to create what we believe is the most accurate real-time fan-activation platform. This enables precision media targeting, measurable sponsorship outcomes, and audience activation through channel partners. It also extends our reach with an established customer network and brings pioneering research on fan behavior that will strengthen how we serve leagues, brands, and broadcasters.

We also bootstrapped a New York-based AdTech tiger team and welcomed prior alums from Pivotal who know how to ship software at scale.

Simplifying how we work

One productivity platform

We consolidated multiple productivity suites from prior acquisitions into one environment. That means single sign-in, a unified calendar, docs and sheets, and drive across the company.

I also vibe coded a small link-shortening service and a lightweight company directory to make working as a global team easier.

AI tooling for everyone

Every employee at Genius Sports now has company-provided access to multiple AI platforms, including tools from OpenAI, GitLab, Google, and others. Engineers pair with AI for code review, refactoring, test generation, and dependency cleanup. Analysts draft first-pass queries and charts. Commercial teams build proposals grounded in live data. Operations and support teams use summarization and retrieval to resolve issues faster.

We are also rolling out custom agents that are beginning to take root across the business: a code assistant that understands our repositories and conventions, a sales companion that summarizes RFPs and assembles tailored playbooks, and an operations triage agent that routes tickets and surfaces the right SOPs. All of this runs with privacy by default, clear guardrails, and a human in the loop.

Ways of Working

We kicked off a Ways of Working initiative to make our teams more iterative and predictable: short iterations, test-driven development, smaller scoped stories, and clearer definitions of done. This builds on my Extreme Programming experience from Pivotal, where pairing, tests first, continuous integration, and small slices were the norm. We modernized how we track work so that roadmaps are real, dashboards reflect reality, and retros drive change. The spirit is simple, fewer heroics, more habits.

We are also migrating our backlogs to Linear and working in partnership with their team, including their embedded agents. Together we are shaping workflows that fit how we build, and we are instrumenting boards so that they become a reliable signal for planning and forecasting.

What comes next

Over the next year we will scale our platforms to stadiums and arenas around the world, from edge capture and computer vision pipelines to data distribution and fan-activation surfaces. The focus remains: deeper automation in our capture stack, deeper application of AI to data and video, deeper integrations between partner data and our own signals, and a stronger emphasis on reliability and security at venue scale. We will also continue the adoption of LLM-driven automation across engineering, operations, commercial workflows, and support, pairing teammates with agents that improve quality and speed.

I am grateful every day to be building this with talented teammates and partners. We are just getting started.

Thanks for reading.

Gustave Kropf the Taco Doggo