Heather Anne Carson fully understood she was on to something big with her new startup Repable when she attended the KeSPA eSport championship in South Korea last autumn.

Operating out of Moncton and Toronto, Repable collects and analyzes data on eSports, or competitive gaming, a fast-growing international phenomenon. It’s estimated some 200 million people will watch competitive gaming this year.

KeSPA was held in a packed arena in Seoul. Thousands of fans — many dressed like characters in the games — were screaming madly as two five-member teams faced off against each other. It was the mania that convinced her and technical co-founder Sean Power they are in a fantastic market.

“When I started looking at the ecosystem of gaming, I learned it’s amazing,” she said in a recent interview. “When I started looking at the numbers I couldn’t ignore the potential in this space. It’s the fastest growing segment of the entertainment industry.”

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An expert in public relations and marketing, Carson is a veteran of the East Coast startup community. (She actually emceed the first PropelICT Demo Day four years ago.) In 2012, she and Renee Warren launched Onboardly, a PR and marketing agency that targeted startups and quickly secured clients across North America. Last year she left the agency to co-found a product-based startup.

“I always knew that eventually I would build a product company,” she said. “Most of it was being exposed to so many really, really, really smart startups in my job. You get the bug. But ideas don’t always just come and it takes just the right catalyst.”

She teamed up with Power last year, and they found that his background in data analytics complemented her marketing savvy. They knew they wanted to do a Big Data venture, and they eventually settled on eSports.

This pastime is growing so quickly that major consumer product brands want to use it as a marketing vehicle, but they don’t know how. Major TV networks want to broadcast it. It’s an opportunity to reach a young audience that doesn’t usually watch television, let alone read newspapers. But these brands don’t have firm metrics on who or what to sponsor or how to approach this new craze.

Repable can charge the brands to provide the data. Power is close to completing a dashboard that will analyze the data collected from the audience of 60 million people around the world. It can tell brands what teams are hot, how to engage players and spectators, and what is gaining in popularity.

The seven-month-old company is now preparing to enter the market. It is now going through the PropelICT accelerator in Moncton and working out of the Digital Media Zone of Ryerson University in Toronto. The company expects to launch a product for enterprise clients in the late summer. Eventually it would like a consumer product that will help people playing the games what is hot and how they can move up in the industry.

“We help teams and agencies understand the attention of the fans,” said Carson. “It’s a huge, huge, huge market and the excitement for us is helping people to make informed decisions.”