SportTechie has more on how this startup combines a product (headgear) and service (NFT platform) to build a connected social experience for athletes and fans.
Our Startups series looks at companies and founders who are innovating in the fields of athlete performance, fan engagement, team/league operations and other high-impact areas in sports. If you’d like to be considered for this series, tell us about your mission.
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World’s shortest elevator pitch: “We provide a multi-sport, 3D-printed headgear, and an NFT platform to drive digital engagement.”
Company: BATS-TOI
Location: Brooklyn, New York
Year founded: 2017
Website/App: https://batstoi.com/; https://digiyo.io/
Funding round to date: “We are doing a Series A.”
Who are your investors? “Our investors include Shane McMahon of WWE, Renzo Gracie of the Gracie family and some of our customers. We’ve raised $1.5 million.”
Are you looking for more investment? “Yes.”
Tell us about yourself, CEO & founder Mario Mercado: “I was a collegiate wrestler at Syracuse University. I wrestled for the New York Athletic Club, for Team USA, and I was formerly the Deputy Commissioner for the New York State Athletic Commission for boxing and MMA in New York State. As a former wrestler, and also going to graduate school—NYU and Columbia—I had to develop a senior project. The project I decided to do was a headgear to better protect wrestlers against head injuries. During the work as the commissioner, I would see a lot of athletes who had head injuries, not primarily from competition but mostly from training. Since the regular headgear was not really designed to protect against head injuries, I designed a new one at the engineering school at NYU.”
How does your product/service work? “For The Mercado, which is the product, it works as a multi-sport headgear. It’s very simple to use. You put it on your head and it’s form fitting. We have integrated electronics inside that monitor your brainwaves in real time to tell you if you have received a concussion. It’s an onsite diagnostic tool. That’s the product. On the service side, for Digiyo, we wanted to provide an easy way for people to get involved in making and minting their own NFT’s that was very seamless and very easy to do. The reason we did Digiyo was to find a different way to market the headgear, The Mercado. We built a marketplace where we could mint our own NFTs. Many athletes asked us if they could do the same. We realized that the same platform that we made our NFTs, the ease of minting was something athletes could do as well by taking their content from their phone, a video or an image, and be able to upload it as simply as you would do an Instagram post.”
digiYo is here! Our new sports metaverse NFT platform. A completely new immersive digital experience. If you are part of the sports community – wrestling, football, MMA, and more – you have you check out @digiYo3.
AR/VR, custom 3D animations, AND a NIL platform for athletes! pic.twitter.com/cepmetTUhb
What problem is your company solving? “We’re solving two problems. Giving athletes who require a soft shell headgear more protection and an easier product to use and (giving) athletes wanting to get into NFTs a very easy way for them to monetize their content.”
What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “The Mercado costs between $90-$150. Our target customers are athletes, wrestlers, flag football, seven on seven, women’s field hockey, lacrosse, soccer players. Athletes that require soft shell headgear in contact sports. For Digiyo, we offer a very easy way for athletes to mint the NFTs without having to pay a gas fee. There’s no cost. Our target customers are athletes, schools, teams and federations.”
How are you marketing your product? “We are the official wrestling headgear for the National Federation of State High School Associations and we have partnerships with other leagues, federations and teams around the country, with the NFHS being one of them. For Digiyo, our partnerships are Dapper Labs and Sony Music.”
How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “We optimize the partnerships we have and show the value proposition for the health and safety for athletes with our products for the headgear, and continue to utilize the partnerships for Digiyo. Our goal is to outfit every wrestler and flag football player in the country with our headgear.”
Who are your competitors, and what makes you different? “For The Mercado, our competitors are legacy headgear companies. What makes us different is the style of our headgear, which is patented, the ease of use and the manufacturing, the way it’s built and the entire look of it.”
What’s the unfair advantage that separates your company? “We have several patents, both utility and design for The Mercado. It’s also our team, our business model, the partnerships we have. For the NFT platform, it really is just making a very simple product that has a huge scale for it to be adopted at a larger scale.”
What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? “The first milestone we’ve reached is being the official wrestling headgear for the National Federation of high schools. We’ve achieved national recognition by the governing body of high school sports. Second, we have deployed the first NFT platform that is the easiest way for a regular layperson to upload and mint an NFT. It’s so easy. It’s as easy as a bowl of Rice Krispies.”
Beyond the pandemic, what obstacles has your company had to overcome? “We’ve faced technical challenges regarding manufacturing, logistics and funding.”
How has your company been affected by the current economic situation, and how are you dealing with it? “We’ve become more nimble and more focused on how we are spending each dollar. We have made sure we are able to justify the spending of each dollar and make sure we are not spending it just to spend more but really focused on our core business model and our product and our problem productivity. It’s really making sure that for every dollar that we spend, we can qualify it as to its necessity.”
A post shared by BATS-TOI (@batstoiofficial)
What are the values that are core to your brand? “The values that are core to our brand are head safety and meaningful social media engagement. Head safety because concussions lead to longer-term effects, such as Parkinson’s and dementia, and have adverse reactions to society as a whole, not only to the athlete but to everyone connected to the athlete. For social media, just having a more meaningful social media experience is important to us because those connections and that engagement should really be a value of how to make more meaningful connections than just having something open-ended.”
What does success ultimately look like for your company? “Success ultimately looks like that we are able to outfit as many athletes as possible with our headgear and they know they can come to us knowing we are providing the best protection possible, and that we are giving them a very easy way to understand Web3 and how to make meaningful social media interactions and build meaningful social media communities.”
What should investors or customers know about you—the person, your life experiences—that shows they can believe in you? “I am committed to them and I’m committed to the products we deliver them, and I am committed to having a company that reflects our values.”
What challenges are there in providing both a headgear and an NFT service? “If you look on the surface of it people will think that, but we use NFTs as a tool to market our headgear differently. What makes it fun and exciting is that the same tools—instead of just having a presence on Instagram, we are now allowing these NFTs and this platform to engage our customers in a much more fun and fulfilling way. It’s only challenging technically. It’s not really challenging and managing both because it’s one in the same.”
Question? Comment? Story idea? Let us know at [email protected].
Photo credits: Courtesy of Bats-Toi
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