Why Evolv Express® Fits So Well in Pro Hockey

In tech, there’s a concept called “product-market fit,” which is when a product really hits the bullseye of a customer need.  Finding product-market fit is often the key unlock for growth of a new product. With almost 100 pro sports customers around the world, it’s safe to say that Evolv has product-market fit in sports.

Perhaps the strongest fit of all is in pro hockey, where we have a market share of 13 out of 32 teams (same as pro football, by the way). I’d argue that there are some fundamental attributes about pro hockey game attendance that make Evolv Express® an especially good fit for fans, teams, and venues. The biggest factor is that hockey fans tend to arrive earlier than fans in other sports.

We have literally hundreds of millions of data points on fan entry to sporting events, so we have a pretty good sense of the arrival patterns of the major sports in North America.  What we see is that, on average, pro hockey fans – at least at the venues which are Evolv customers – arrive noticeably earlier than fans at other sports. More than 89% of scans at Evolv’s pro hockey venues take place before the game starts. On average, one percentage point difference at the typical hockey game roughly equates to about 130 fans, so a six-point difference means almost 800 more fans could enter the building at the start of the typical game. Considering an average arena capacity of around 18,000, that’s close to 5% more fans in the building – a very noticeable difference.

Pro hockey fans also arrive in a more compressed time window than the other sports. Anyone who has worked at – or even attended – a sporting event knows that fans tend to arrive late. Between tailgate parties, traffic, and even just getting out of work on a weeknight, it’s hard for most fans to get to the game early. We especially see this in hockey, where a greater percentage of fans arrive in the half-hour before the start of the game than in the other sports. The difference in the data is really noticeable — almost 10% more of the total scans at a typical game are recorded in those 30 minutes compared to the other leagues in our data set.

So, when you have fans that tend to arrive early – but not too early – you need high-capacity security screening to handle the crunch. That’s exactly the situation that Express has been designed for … convenience and security, without sacrificing speed. And that’s why Evolv and pro hockey teams and venues make such ideal partners.

All of this is especially relevant today, on the eve of the 2025/2026 NHL regular season. For more than 500 regular season games to come (it’s too soon to even think about the playoffs!), we’ll do our part to help fans get to their seats quickly and securely, no matter when they choose to arrive.

Good luck to all our pro hockey customers, and best wishes to all their fans! Have a great season.