DOJO Madness closes Zack project

Esports data startup DOJO Madness has closed its intelligent gaming assistant Zack after revising its offerings.

Up until August of this year, DOJO Madness had three business units: Zack, SaaS data platform Shadow.gg, and data company Bayes Esports Solutions. Zack has since been cancelled and, subsequently, around a dozen employees have been laid off.

RELATED: DOJO Madness and Sportradar launch Bayes Esports Solutions

The company, which counts serial esports entrepreneur Jens Hilgers amongst its co-founders, decided that its Zack business unit – despite receiving a lot of downloads when it went to market – didn’t have a future as bright as Shadow.gg and Bayes Esports Solutions do. It was decided that it would move forward with the latter two business units, but not the former.

Zack was an assistant for gamers that tailored content to users based on interests, interactions, and gaming behaviour. It provided gaming news, personal statistics, and match reports for the likes of League of Legends and Fortnite.

RELATED: DOJO Madness raises $6m in Series A II round

Hilgers commented on the closure to Esports Insider: “After 4 years of iteration we recently phased out our B2C business (Zack and formerly LOLSUMO) and are focusing our entire group efforts on our two B2B business units BAYES and Shadow. With both of these companies we have been able to build a very strong position in the global market for Esports data and analytics driven by deep technology and our year-long sector experience with many of the largest stakeholders in the space being valuable partners of ours.”

DOJO Madness formed Bayes Esports Solutions as a joint venture with sports data company Sportradar in January and announced that it had acquired the data distribution rights for Riot Games’ League of Legends esports efforts in August.

DOJO Madness was founded in February 2015 by Markus Fuhrmann, Christian Gruber, and Hilgers.

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