Genius Sports revenue surged 52% in the first quarter of the year and raised its sales forecast for the year by as much as 37% as the sports data and analytics company reported its first quarter as a publicly traded business Thursday morning.
Genius tallied $53.7 million in sales in the quarter ended March 31, surpassing expectations of $44 million from two Wall Street analysts covering the stock, according to data from S&P. The figures compare to sales of $35.4 million in the same period of 2020. The London-based business posted a net loss of $5.3 million, narrowing from a loss of $7.5 million in the comparable quarter. Genius posted $9.3 million in adjusted ebitda, quadrupling performance from the year-ago quarter. Ebitda—earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization—is commonly a preferred metric to net income for analyzing the underlying health of technology businesses.
“We delivered superb results in the first quarter of 2021, demonstrating our continued excellent momentum and solid execution of strategic commitments,” Mark Locke, Genius co-founder and CEO, said in the earnings press release. “There is a significant opportunity to utilize our leading portfolio of official sports data, supported by our unique technology, scale and growing network of industry partners.”
Genius Sports is a sports data and analytics company that covers about 240,000 sporting events a year and has partnerships with more than 650 leagues and sports books. Data is used to support sports betting and fantasy gaming, as well as efforts by teams and leagues to hone their advertising, fan engagement and game analytics to improve competitiveness. Founded in 2000, it elected in October to go public by special purpose acquisition company in a deal that closed last month.
Genius reported that the biggest part of its core business—betting technology, content and services—enjoyed a sales increase of 42%, to $39 million. The company credited price increases it was able to negotiate with customers on the back of new services added to its portfolio. Media technology and services business more than doubled, to $9.4 million in the period, driven by new customer acquisitions. Sports technology related sales rose to $5.4 million, an increase of almost 42%.
The company also hiked its outlook for the full year, saying revenue should come in somewhere from $250 million to $260 million, compared to earlier guidance of $190 million. Ebitda for the underlying business could be as high as $45 million, compared to $35 million it indicated earlier, although one-time costs including the cost of going public in the U.S. would lower bottom line ebitda to a range of $10 million to $22 million for the year, according to the filing.
A number of transactions took place in the first part of the year that lead management to expect growth. Genius won a deal to be the exclusive distributor of a series of official National Football League data, acquired free-to-play games maker FanHub and added two more states where it is permitted to supply betting data, bringing the total to 13 and three tribal jurisdictions.
Genius shares closed at $19.57 Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange, up about 20% since becoming officially publicly traded, and up 96% from when the agreement to go public by SPAC was announced.