Headquartered between New York and Lisbon, sportstech startup ScorePlay has raised a €4.5 million seed round led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, bringing their total funding to €5.8 million.
It was only a year ago that ScorePlay raised over €1 million. They provide sports organizations worldwide with an AI-powered media infrastructure as teams and athletes enter a new era of fan content consumption. The investment will help ScorePlay grow its tech team, expand its New York office, and consolidate its position as the go-to media solution in sports.
“Sports teams have seen a meteoric rise over the past 20 years, but their media infrastructures just haven’t been able to keep up – they’re still using Google Drive, Dropbox and WhatsApp. We saw that gap grow so we went directly to the end-user and co-constructed a tech solution made for the sports industry. ScorePlay is built by and for sports organizations, which is one of the main reasons it has been hugely successful,” said Victorien Tixier, CEO of ScorePlay.
Besides Seven Seven Six, there were many other investors in this round. Following in the footsteps of Eintracht Frankfurt’s Mario Götze (with Companion-M), NBA All-Star Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman’s 35V, invested alongside Manchester United’s Raphaël Varane and Philadelphia Union’s Alejandro Bedoya as they also saw ScorePlay’s potential within soccer. Additionally, 2020 US Open Champion Dominic Thiem has also joined the round.
On the tech spectrum, entering alongside Alexis Ohanian and Seven Seven Six, are Renaud Visage, co-founder of Eventbrite, the largest event technology company in the world, and Alex Yazdi, co-founder and CEO of Voodoo, the French mobile game unicorn. Finally, to guide them in the SaaS and creator economy, ScorePlay received investment from several founders of Jellysmack (Michael Philippe, Robin Sabban), as well as the three co-founders of Hexa (formerly eFounders) Thibaud Elzière, Quentin Nickmans and Amaury Sepulchre, the best European startup studio and a group of entrepreneurs with significant experience in US growth.
Founded in 2021, ScorePlay experienced a huge shift in sports consumption growing up as sports fans. In a non-stop digital world, sports fans are no longer fully satisfied with the unilateral broadcast narrative and need constant authentic content from clubs, leagues, and competitions.
Co-founders Victorien and Xavier were inspired to build ScorePlay when they realized the chaos of media management in sports was blocking this content at scale in a $240 billion sports market. They used AI to automate the management and distribution of photos and videos to enable athletes and clubs to tell the stories they wanted in real-time, and now work across over 30 different sports. They help marketing teams at the largest organizations in the world create content that fans want to see every day. ScorePlay is the first all-in-one AI-powered media operating system powering sports.
In 2022, their revenue grew 1000% and in under 2 years over 120 sports organizations including the Swiss Football League, MotoGP (Dorna), Sacramento Kings (NBA), West Ham United (Premier League), Atlético de Madrid (La Liga), Major League Pickleball and 16 MLS and NWSL teams (including Angel City, Portland Thorns, Nashville SC, OL Reign, and Inter Miami) have signed up to use the ScorePlay platform. Today, more than 10,000 athletes (including Lionel Messi, Alex Morgan, Declan Rice, Megan Rapinoe etc.) receive their content automatically through the ScorePlay Athlete App, to build their own brands like never before.
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- Source: https://www.eu-startups.com/2023/07/lisbon-based-scoreplay-raises-e4-5-million-seed-round-to-fuel-up-its-ai-powered-content-manager-for-professional-sports/
