Elisha Ferrara is a Canadian entrepreneur who wants NFL fans to have the same data on their cell phone that the sports announcers have in their broadcast booth.

For free.

Ferrara is the CEO of Kitchener, Ontario-based OnPoint Sports, whose mobile app now provides the user with the broadest range of data possible on an optimal smartphone interface. He started the project because, as a football fan, he thought he could do better than the “dinosaur era apps” that are available for NFL fans. Now his company has almost 5,000 users and he’s looking for a second round of funding.

“Simply put, OnPoint provides a much better service than the standard network-backed sports apps most people are used to,” said Ferrara, pointing to the cell phone in his hand as he sat in the Communitech hub. “We have seen explosive innovation in almost all areas of mobile tech with the exception of sports – OnPoint is the first app to bring sports into the future.”

Early in 2015, he and two work colleagues Vitaliy Kondratiev, and Tyler Lyn began to build an app that would provide instant data to football fans. The business rationale was that the NFL obviously has a massive international following, and its fantasy football bi-product is an even bigger business. In fact, fantasy football is estimated to be an $11 billion-a-year business, exceeding the total $10 billion in revenue brought in by the NFL itself. The business case made sense, and the all three quit their jobs on the same day to focus on OnPoint.

The app, which operates on Android and iOS operating systems, allows the easy display of data on all 32 NFL teams and their players. This includes stats on every play of every game, league leaders in various categories, all presented with charts and tables to provide a visual display of the information the user wants.  

Ferrara said the most popular feature is the side-by-side comparisons of players, which help fantasy football players compare two players on their rosters and decide which they should play in any given weekend.

Going into the 2015 season, the OnPoint team had coded the app, but needed to buy the data so it would work. They found themselves in a Catch-22 situation in which funders wouldn’t put money into the company until they could assess the market reaction to the app loaded with the data; but OnPoint couldn’t buy the data until it got funding.

So Ferarra struck a deal. Sportradar, which provides data to a range of leading media sites, granted the company a trial run through the preseason.  That was just enough of a pilot to convince investors that OnPoint had a market. The company was able to raise about $85,000 – enough to licence the data and cover the storage and server costs.

OnPoint now offers data that dates back to the 2012 NFL season, and is up-to-date with current games. In fact, the app is able to update data three to five seconds after each play in a live football game. The company says it’s the fastest delivery of NFL data on the market.

With about 5,000 users, fans are adopting the technology. Thirty-year-old Brian Kelly, of the Dallas suburb of Little Elm, was browsing the App Store early in the season, found OnPoint and has been using it since.

“I’m a web developer so I noticed the good design first, then I noticed the speed,” he said in an interview. “Mainly I use it for fantasy. Unfortunately, I was plagued with injuries this year but the player head-to-head feature definitely helped a lot.”

As you might expect, most of OnPoint’s clients are in the U.S. but it also has strong penetration in its home country of Canada, and surprising penetration in Mexico. When the company learned of the popularity of the NFL in Mexico, the founders had the content translated into Spanish and got some media play in Mexico City. It led to a surge in Spanish-language users.

With the football season soon ending, Ferrara is now looking ahead. He and his partners are examining sports other than football to cover, and they are trying to raise about $250,000 to push the product forward.

“I can see in the future having all the big sports in here,” he said. “What we’ve been able to build so far is really user friendly, and we want to keep growing. “