The most valuable seat in a sports arena may not be courtside. It may be in the control room, where a team executive is deciding whether a new ticketing tool, video system or piece of training equipment is ready for game day. That is the seat HBSE Ventures offers founders. The New York investment firm writes venture checks, but its more distinctive currency is access to the machinery of professional sport.
HBSE Ventures is part of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, the organization built by Josh Harris and David Blitzer around properties that include the Philadelphia 76ers, New Jersey Devils and Prudential Center. For a startup, those names are not merely a handsome slide in a pitch deck. They represent potential users, knowledgeable critics and routes into a famously relationship-driven industry.
The fund says it works with HBSE executives to give portfolio companies product feedback, competitive context and introductions to teams, leagues and strategic capital. That makes its proposition easy to understand: money plus a map. In sports, where long sales cycles and institutional caution can exhaust a young company, knowing where the doors are located matters almost as much as having the key.
The product is proximity
Chip Austin and Brad Farkas co-founded HBSE Ventures in 2015 after working together at i-Hatch Ventures. Their biographies read more like a compressed history of commercial technology than a pair of sports résumés. Austin helped build Bertelsmann Online, ran early internet businesses at Prodigy and worked at McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and IBM. Farkas wrote software, founded communications companies, worked in venture capital at Lazard and helped connect network-equipment maker Compatible Systems with Cisco, which acquired it for $250 million.
That history explains why the portfolio is not a collection of novelty fan apps. The team has spent decades looking at distribution, infrastructure, media and enterprise adoption. Partner Andy Roos adds growth-equity experience across software, consumer technology, communications infrastructure and live entertainment. The official investment team also lists associate John Hendren, who came from technology and telecom private equity.
We aim to accelerate a company’s path to scale.HBSE Ventures, on its operating approach
The phrase “sports tech” can be misleadingly narrow. It suggests a gadget strapped to an athlete or an app checking a score. HBSE Ventures treats sport as a stack of connected markets: the athlete performs; the venue stages; the broadcaster packages; the advertiser pays; the fan watches, shares, bets, buys and trains. A useful product can enter at any layer.
A portfolio that follows the fan home
At the media layer sits WSC Sports, whose computer-vision system creates near real-time highlight clips. The customer is not the person making a trick-shot reel in a bedroom; it is the league, team or broadcaster facing a flood of games and a hungry set of digital channels. Automation turns one live feed into many pieces of publishable media. In 2022, HBSE Ventures joined a $100 million WSC funding round alongside investment groups linked to other major sports owners.
Arcturus tackles another production problem: editing and distributing volumetric video, the material used to render performances in three dimensions. Insoundz works on spatial audio capture and processing for venues and studios. Anzu moves in a different direction, placing programmatic advertising inside video games. Together, they show the fund's interest in the parts of entertainment that audiences may experience vividly without ever noticing the software underneath.
Portfolio signal / relative presence in the public showcase
Then there is the commerce surrounding the event. FEVO makes ticket purchases social, converting a group invitation into a transaction. Betsperts built a social and content destination for betting and fantasy sports. Jackpot.com takes lottery orders online in eligible markets. Underdog Fantasy sits closer to the familiar fantasy-sports business, while Infinite Canvas publishes creator-led games. The common thread is not the ball. It is the habit around the ball: gathering friends, making picks, buying access, creating worlds and finding reasons to return tomorrow.
The portfolio follows people out of the arena, too. FightCamp puts boxing instruction in the home. Ergatta turns rowing into a game. Future pairs customers with remote personal trainers. Obe Fitness delivers live and on-demand classes. These companies compete for consistency, not merely attention. Their products must persuade someone to sweat on an ordinary Tuesday, a more intimate test than convincing a fan to watch a final.
Where movement becomes measurement
Proteus Motion makes the fund's performance thesis tangible. Its system measures strength and power through three-dimensional resistance, serving athletic performance and rehabilitation settings. FastModel Sports takes a software route, supplying basketball organizations with scouting, play-diagramming and workflow tools. HBSE Ventures says FastModel applications are used by 90 percent of NBA and Division I teams, a striking example of a vertical product going deep inside a relatively small but influential market.
Capital, product criticism, sports-industry context and introductions to prospective buyers or partners.
A filtered view of tools that may improve performance, operations, content or revenue.
New approaches to sound, ticketing, fan experience, advertising and event economics.
More personalized media, social commerce, games, fitness and interactive ways to follow sport.
This range gives HBSE Ventures a place in the market between a conventional corporate venture arm and a specialist financial investor. Courtside Ventures, Sapphire Sport, Elysian Park Ventures, Will Ventures, SeventySix Capital and Drive by DraftKings all chase parts of the same expanding opportunity. Some bring league relationships, famous limited partners, betting distribution or broad consumer expertise. HBSE's clearest point of difference is an operating portfolio that includes both teams and a major venue.
That advantage should not be romanticized. A recognizable team cannot rescue weak unit economics, and a pilot is not the same thing as a repeatable sales process. Strategic investors can also create awkward questions about exclusivity, priorities and whether other clubs will view a product as belonging to a rival. The value lies in learning faster: what an operator will pay for, how security reviews unfold, whether a product survives a packed building and which feature sounded clever only in the conference room.
The quickest way to fail is to run out of money.Brad Farkas, advice to sports-tech founders in 2023
The economics behind the access
The business model is still venture capital. HBSE Ventures buys equity in private companies and seeks a return when those stakes appreciate or are sold. Public industry databases list two fund vehicles and track roughly 33 investments, though the firm does not publish fund sizes, check ranges, revenue or valuation on its website. The result is a low-profile institution compared with the consumer brands in its portfolio.
Its public deal trail nevertheless shows the cadence. The firm participated in later rounds for WSC Sports and Arcturus, backed a $9 million Series A for Proteus Motion, joined a $6 million seed round for Infinite Canvas and, in March 2024, appeared in a $1 million financing for FastModel Sports. Those investments cross seed, Series A and later growth rounds. The pattern suggests flexibility around stage when a company fits the operating thesis.
The customer for HBSE Ventures, in the narrow sense, is the founder choosing whose capital to accept. The founder's customer may be an athletic department, media-rights holder, coach, marketer or everyday fan. HBSE's job is to reduce the distance between them. Its expertise is not one technology. It is translating among the people who build products, the people who run sports businesses and the people who experience the result.
The market beyond the scoreboard
Sports investing once looked like a choice between owning a team and sponsoring one. Technology has filled the space between those poles. Rights owners need more clips for more platforms. Venues want smoother transactions. Coaches want better evidence. Games want ads that belong in the scene. Consumers want training that travels. Fans want community before, during and after the final whistle.
HBSE Ventures fits where those demands meet a stubborn industry reality: sport is emotional at the front and operational at the back. The emotion attracts founders. The operations decide whether their companies live. A fund connected to both has a credible reason to be in the room.
Its most reusable lesson has little to do with basketball or hockey. An investor's network becomes valuable only when it is converted into specific work: a product review, a warm introduction, a test under pressure, a candid no. HBSE Ventures has built its identity around that conversion. The portfolio is eclectic because modern sport is eclectic. Somewhere between the rowing machine, the highlight engine and the arena turnstile, the same question keeps appearing: does this make the experience work better for the person on either side?
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