fan-engagement
(19)
Kansas City Chiefs
Kansas City still sells football on Sundays. The more revealing business is everything built around it - a year-round engine of tickets, content, commerce, sponsorship and belonging that now travels far beyond Arrowhead.
HBSE Ventures
HBSE Ventures is built around a useful wager: the best sports-tech investor may be the one that can turn teams, venues and fans into a living laboratory. Its portfolio shows how wide that laboratory has become.
Audience Republic
Unleash your event's full potential with our all-in-one audience CRM and marketing platform.
Medallion
Medallion is a New York-based music technology company that gives recording artists a white-label digital hub to build and monetize their own fan communities. Founded by former Songkick CEO Matt Jones and launched in 2022, the platform lets artists promote releases, tour dates and merch drops, sell digital collectibles and 'Digital Deluxe' albums, and offer exclusive access to their most devoted superfans - all under the artist's own branding rather than a third-party social feed. Backed by $22.7M in funding from investors including Dragonfly, Lightspeed Faction, The Chernin Group and Metallica's Black Squirrel Partners, Medallion powers communities for artists such as Jungle, Disclosure, Greta Van Fleet, Sigur Ros and My Morning Jacket.
Pro Padel League
Pro Padel League (PPL) is North America's premier professional padel league, founded in 2023 by CEO Mike Dorfman. It runs a city-based franchise model of 10 teams across the U.S., Canada and Mexico, each fielding both men's and women's sides, with a season of multi-city events culminating in the City's Cup Finals. Backed by a $15M Series A led by Charlotte Hornets governor Rick Schnall, PPL is building the commercial and broadcast infrastructure to capitalize on padel's rapid growth in the American market.
ScorePlay
ScorePlay is an AI-powered media asset management platform built specifically for the sports industry. It centralizes photos, videos and live broadcast content into one system, then uses computer vision and facial recognition to automatically tag athletes, sponsors and moments so teams, leagues and federations can find and distribute content in seconds instead of hours. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in New York, ScorePlay is used by 200+ sports organizations worldwide and raised a $13M Series A in February 2025.
Unrivaled Basketball
Unrivaled is a women's 3-on-3 professional basketball league founded by WNBA stars Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart and run by president and CEO Alex Bazzell. Built to keep top players competing at home during the WNBA offseason, it pairs the highest average salary in American women's team sports with equity ownership for its athletes. Launched in Miami in January 2025, the compressed full-court league reached a $340 million valuation after a 2025 Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
Lava.ai
Lava.ai is a San Francisco software company that runs a Realtime AI customer-engagement platform for sports teams, live-event venues, retailers and large enterprises. Its engine ties together ticketing, point-of-sale, mobile wallets, apps, parking and live game feeds through 250+ integrations, then uses AI to deliver personalized offers, membership perks, stored-value rewards and clienteling 'in the moment.' Co-founded by TIBCO founder Vivek Ranadive and former TIBCO executive Wen Miao, Lava counts more than 50 franchises and brands - including the NBA, Real Madrid, the LA Rams and the Cleveland Browns - among its users.
Quintar, Inc.
Quintar is a Santa Clara-based extended reality company building a device-agnostic spatial XR platform that turns physical venues into digitally enhanced 'Quintar Places.' Its patented Q.reality platform combines a Spatial Visual Positioning System with True Spatial Video to overlay real-time, data-driven content on live sports and other events. Quintar is the official mobile AR and XR developer of the PGA TOUR and built PGA TOUR Vision, the first professional golf application for Apple Vision Pro. Founded in 2021 by former Intel CTO Dr. Sankar (Jay) Jayaram and Dr. Jeff Jonas, the company has raised roughly $11 million, including an $8.2 million Series A in 2024.
TrueFan AI
TrueFan AI is an India-based generative-AI company that builds a B2B platform for producing hyper-personalized, studio-quality video at scale. From a single short recording it can generate localized videos in 175+ languages, letting enterprises turn one shoot into thousands of tailored marketing, sales and communication videos. Founded in 2020 as a celebrity fan-engagement app, it pivoted in 2024 into an enterprise video-generation business now used by 100+ companies across banking, insurance, healthcare, retail and media.
Just Women's Sports
Just Women's Sports is a Los Angeles-based digital media company built entirely around covering, celebrating and growing women's sports. Founded in 2020 by former pro soccer player Haley Rosen, JWS produces editorial coverage, athlete-hosted podcasts, video highlights, a newsletter and merchandise across web and social - reaching tens of millions of fans and treating women's sports as the real, growing business it is rather than a charity case.
Professional Fighters League
The Professional Fighters League (PFL) is a global mixed martial arts organization that reinvented the sport with a sports-season structure - a regular season, playoffs, and a championship where fighters compete for real money instead of matchmaker whim. Founded in 2017 by venture capitalist Donn Davis, PFL broadcasts to 160+ countries, has expanded into regional leagues across Europe, Africa, MENA and the Pacific, acquired rival Bellator MMA in 2023, and signed marquee names like Francis Ngannou and Jake Paul. It positions itself as the credible global challenger to the UFC.
Rivet
Rivet is a Boston-based, AI-powered fan engagement platform that helps musicians, creators, labels and their teams turn attention into revenue. It stitches together scattered fan signals from social, commerce, ticketing, streaming and community channels into one owned view of every fan, then automates the outreach - email, SMS, DMs and ads - that converts casual listeners into repeat buyers. Born from a musician's frustration with tracking fans in spreadsheets, Rivet gives independent artists the kind of first-party data and CRM tooling once reserved for the industry's top 1 percent.
Audius
Audius is a decentralized music streaming and discovery platform that lets artists upload, share, and monetize tracks directly to fans without traditional gatekeepers. Built on Solana and Ethereum and powered by the AUDIO token, the platform runs on a network of community-operated content and discovery nodes - giving creators ownership of their catalogs and a direct line to listeners.
Maestro
Maestro is a Los Angeles-based interactive video and live streaming platform that lets brands, creators, and rights holders build their own direct-to-consumer streaming destinations. Instead of renting an audience on someone else's platform, Maestro customers own the experience end to end - custom branded sites, interactive overlays (chat, polls, tip jars), and built-in monetization through ticketing, subscriptions, live shopping, and tips, while keeping their data and most of their revenue. Founded in 2015 by Ari Evans, the company powers streams for names like Billie Eilish, the Grammys, Coachella, Fortnite/Epic Games, and Microsoft.
Megaphone TV
Megaphone TV is a New York-based participation entertainment studio that turns passive TV viewers into active participants. Its interactive sponsorship platform lets local, national and sports broadcasters layer real-time polling, contests, trivia, user-generated content and interactive on-air graphics onto live shows - features designed to deepen viewer engagement while opening new, sponsor-friendly advertising revenue. An Emmy winner for interactive media, the platform is used across the majority of top U.S. local broadcast markets and by major networks worldwide.
WIT
WIT is a New York-based gamification and digital activation platform that helps pro sports teams and Fortune 1000 brands turn casual fans into engaged, identifiable participants. Through a library of 30+ turnkey experiences - giveaways, polls, brackets, vote-to-win, fan maps and fan walls - WIT collects first-party data, sources authentic fan content, fulfills sponsor obligations and drives revenue. Founded in 2018 by Vaidhy Murti, it now powers activations for roughly 100 venues, leagues and teams across the NFL, NHL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS, NWSL and NCAA, plus brands like Coca-Cola and Bud Light.
FEVO
FEVO is a New York-based social commerce and ticketing company that turns the lonely online checkout into a group activity. Its Social Checkout lets fans buy tickets together, split payments, mix inventory, and share events across their networks - generating extra sales through built-in virality. Since 2016 it has helped 750+ blue-chip brands in sports, music, and live entertainment sell more than 15 million tickets to roughly 4 million consumers.
Genvid Holdings Inc.
Genvid Holdings Inc. is a New York media-technology company that invented the Massively Interactive Live Event (MILE) - part TV show, part video game, where thousands of viewers vote on what happens next in real time. Founded in 2016 by Square Enix cloud-gaming veterans, Genvid has produced the Emmy-winning SILENT HILL: Ascension, the Webby-winning The Walking Dead: Last Mile, Rival Peak, and DC Heroes United. Backed by $166M in funding, the company is now extending its production infrastructure into studio-grade generative AI tooling for professional creators.