sports-tech
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Stadia Ventures knows who should take your call
The sports investor pairs startup capital with access to the people who buy, sell and run the games. Its most revealing deal put two portfolio companies to work on the same highlights.
DivInc charges founders nothing. Keeping it free is the hard part.
The Texas nonprofit helps overlooked founders build technology businesses without giving up equity. Its own funding squeeze reveals what that promise takes.
TeamFeePay wants the coach back on the pitch
A Belfast company turned the chore of collecting football subs into a club management business. With £9 million in fresh backing, it is selling volunteers something scarce: time to get on with the game.
The AI Employee Selling Tickets After the Box Office Goes Home
Satisfi Labs started with a food finder. Its customers kept asking for more - fan support, warm leads, ticket checkout and proof that the bot earned its keep. A decade later, the company is selling a managed AI workforce to the places where questions arrive in crowds.
The Pocket-Sized Radar Gun That Talked Its Way Into 30 Big-League Dugouts
Three Sonoma County engineers looked at a $1,000 radar gun the size of a hair dryer and asked why anyone measuring a fastball should need either. Fifteen years later their answer sits in 30 major-league dugouts.
Ryzer Turned Camp Paperwork Into Recruiting Data - A Playbook for Founders in Boring Markets
The Iowa company began with envelopes, checks and harried coaches. Nineteen years later, its event network became the missing front door for a college-recruiting platform.
Scrum Ventures Built a Two-Way Door Between Silicon Valley and Japan
The firm writes early-stage checks, then does something harder to copy: it turns Japanese companies, cities and even a baseball village into landing pads for global startups.
The Accelerator That Grew Up and Became Corporate Innovation’s Operating System
Boomtown started by coaching founders. A decade later, it helps large organizations find, test, fund and deploy the ideas their own machinery tends to miss.
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.
Narrative
Narrative is a San Diego and San Francisco based Y Combinator (Fall 2025) startup building AI-powered infrastructure for sports content creation. Its platform turns live broadcasts into publish-ready highlight clips in under 30 seconds and gives professional video editors an AI editor - described as 'Cursor for professional video editing' - that adds b-roll from transcripts, searches large video libraries in natural language, and batches edits through chat. Narrative sells both an editor product and a video-editing/clipping API to broadcasters, teams, and leagues.
Lucra
Lucra is a B2B competitive-loyalty platform that lets brands run live social competitions - tournaments, head-to-head challenges and mini-games - inside their own apps and websites through a white-label SDK. Originally launched in 2019 as a peer-to-peer real-money sports gaming app, the company pivoted to selling gamified engagement as a modern alternative to points-based loyalty programs, handling compliance, payments and fraud as a merchant of record. Its clients include Dave & Buster's, Five Iron Golf, TouchTunes and ChessKings, and in April 2026 it raised a $20M Series B led by ARK Invest's venture fund - ARK's first time leading an early-stage deal.
SeatGeek
SeatGeek is a New York-based ticketing company that runs a mobile-first marketplace for live sports, concerts and theater alongside an enterprise platform that powers primary ticketing for teams, leagues and venues. It is best known for Deal Score, an algorithm that rates every listing by price and seat value, and it competes with Ticketmaster and StubHub across both the primary and secondary ticket markets.
Movemint
Movemint is a San Francisco software company building a modern operating system for endurance events. Founded in 2024 by former Strava engineering leader Zack Isaacs and designer Taylor Peliska, it gives race organizers one hub for registration, e-commerce, timing, results, email marketing, volunteers, and sponsors, while giving athletes a social, Strava-connected place to sign up, share results, and celebrate friends. It has grown fast, tripling its business roughly every quarter since launch, and now powers hundreds of events worldwide.
MOVRS
MOVRS is a San Francisco- and Los Angeles-based AI and computer vision company building vision models that understand how people move and interact in the real world. It turns ordinary video into high-fidelity 3D human data and biomechanical measurements - no bodysuits, no marker dots, no camera arrays - and applies that data to sports storytelling, athlete training, and machine-learning datasets for industries from healthcare to robotics.
Mustard
Mustard is a Los Angeles-area sports-tech company that puts elite athletic coaching in an app. Using AI and computer vision, it analyzes ordinary smartphone video of a pitcher's throwing motion or a golfer's swing, compares it against a decades-deep biomechanics database, and returns a report card plus a personalized drill plan. Co-founded by legendary throwing coach Dr. Tom House, the company aims to make world-class, data-driven coaching accessible to any athlete, starting with baseball and golf and expanding toward other sports.
OTTO SPORT AI
OTTO SPORT AI is a Minneapolis-based startup building an AI-powered operating system for youth sports. Founded by veterans of SportsEngine, TeamSnap, NCSA, and FloSports and led by CEO Luke Zaientz, it consolidates fragmented tools for club management, league and tournament operations, ticketing, and athlete recruitment into one platform. Its flagship AI product, OTTO PILOT, answers parent and athlete questions from an organization's own knowledge base to cut administrative workload. The company launched publicly in January 2026 with $16.5M in seed funding and three strategic acquisitions.
SportsManias
SportsManias is a Miami-based digital media company and the self-described leader in animated sports emojis, GIFs, and augmented reality effects. It builds officially licensed emojis and AR filters of pro athletes and their signature celebrations, distributing them across messaging keyboards and platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Google, and GIPHY, while also running a real-time sports news app powered by patent-pending AI. Through partnerships with leagues, players associations, and major brands, the company turns fan passion into shareable, monetizable digital content.
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.
Trajektory
Trajektory is a Chicago-based sponsorship intelligence platform that helps teams, leagues, brands, and agencies measure the value of every sponsorship asset - digital and non-digital - in one place. Using AI logo detection and data aggregation across broadcast, streaming, social, in-venue signage, email, web, and mobile, it turns months of manual recap work into real-time, auditable reporting. The platform tracks more than $180 billion in annual sponsorship value and works with roughly half of major North American pro teams.
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.