Shaun Meredith, co-founder and CEO of Omnic Data.

Omnic Data Inc., a Brunswick-based startup building an artificial intelligence platform and performance-analytics tools for the booming esports industry, has raised $750,000 in seed funding.

Omnic will use the fresh capital to hire additional engineering talent and cover operational expenses, according to an announcement from the company.

The company, which graduated in December from the Roux Institute Techstars Accelerator in Portland, currently has four full-time employees, including co-founders Shaun Meredith and Chuck Goldman. It recently signed a lease to open its first office in Brunswick.

Esports—the competitive playing of video games—has become one of the most popular spectator sports in the world with 220 million people logging in last year to watch the League of Legends championships—60 million more than that year’s Super Bowl. But despite the money and talent pouring into the space, coaches and players still lack access to the type of sophisticated performance analytics tools that other professional sports teams rely on, according to Meredith, a former U.S. Navy submarine officer who serves as Omnic’s CEO. This is where Omnic comes in, he said.

“This capital will allow us to continue building the esports industry’s first AI-enabled platform to improve player performance—right here in Maine,” said Meredith. “Our goal is to help the world’s 1.8 billion aspiring esports players to activate their superpowers.”

The company has spent the last two years building an AI platform, which it calls Forge, that uses computer vision and deep learning techniques to analyze game play video and provide recommendations for how the player—whether a casual competitor or a pro—could improve their performance. To date, Omnic’s AI engine has been trained on more than 5,400 hours of gameplay provided by 140 professional esports athletes, according to Meredith.

Rich Miner, co-founder of Android and a former partner at Google Ventures, led Omnic’s round. He met Meredith and Goldman while serving as a mentor in the Roux Institute Techstars Accelerator and said he immediately saw the opportunity to apply advanced AI and deep learning techniques to the burgeoning and digitally native esports industry, which in 2021 is valued at more than $1 billion, an almost 50 percent increase from the previous year, according to XX.

“This company has identified a glaring gap in esports,” Miner said in a statement. “I’ve looked at a lot of platforms that leverage computer vision and AI, and what Shaun and the Omnic team have developed is some of the best I’ve ever seen.”

Other investors in this pre-seed round include Steven Koltai, a serial tech entrepreneur who served as President Obama’s Senior Advisor for Entrepreneurship, and Sam Brin, one of the first five employees at Robinhood.

Omnic has already reached deals to provide its platform to two professional esports teams, one collegiate team, and one club team.

“Omnic’s insights are on point and help our coaches use data to help our players be more effective,” said Chris Chung, general manager of the San Francisco Shock and Head of Asia for NRG Esports.

The company also announced that it has recently partnered with Boston-based Uptime Esports to explore bringing a competitive club team to Maine. Uptime Esports operates esports gaming lounges in New England, as well as sponsors competitive club esports teams, which will also begin using Omnic’s Forge platform.