FILED FROM CHICAGO, IL
Somewhere in a Chicago office, a sponsorship director is not crying into a spreadsheet. This is new.
For most of the last two decades, the people who sell and service sports sponsorships spent their springs in a particular kind of misery known internally as "recap season." A brand had paid seven or eight figures to put its logo on a jersey, a rink board, a halftime segment, an email footer. At year's end, someone had to prove that money did something. So they opened forty browser tabs, three vendor portals, and a spreadsheet that should have been retired during the Obama administration, and they started counting logos by hand.
Trajektory is the reason a growing share of those people now go home at a reasonable hour. The company, 48 people and counting, builds the platform that measures sponsorship value across everything - broadcast, streaming, social, the LED boards, the static signs, the inbox - and does it in real time instead of in a frantic April. It tracks more than $180 billion in annual sponsorship value, which is a number large enough to be abstract, so here is a smaller one: the manual work it replaces used to run past 1,200 hours a year. Trajektory gets that under two.
Sponsorship is more than just social and TV broadcast.
- Trajektory's founding premise, and its quietest provocation
The Problem They Saw
A $100-billion industry was being graded on a curve
Here is the uncomfortable thing about sponsorship: it is one of the largest line items in sports and entertainment, and for years it was measured worse than almost anything else a marketer spent on. Digital ads had dashboards down to the click. A logo on a goalpost had a person with a clicker and a hunch.
The measurement that did exist tended to fixate on the glamorous, countable surfaces - television exposure, social impressions - because those were the assets you could buy a tracker for. Everything else, which is to say most of the actual deal, went unmeasured. A team could tell a sponsor what their TV-visible rink board was worth and then wave vaguely at the concourse signage, the in-arena activation, the email program, the mobile app. The industry had quietly agreed to value the parts that were easy to value and ignore the rest.
That worked fine until the brands paying the bills started asking harder questions. When you are writing a check with that many zeros, "trust us, it tested well" stops being an acceptable answer.
Reporting used to cover about 15% of a rights holder's partners. The other 85% got a polite estimate.
- The gap Trajektory was built to close
The Founders' Bet
Alex Kerr had lived on both sides of the bad report
Alex Kerr did not arrive at sponsorship measurement through a clever market analysis. He arrived through grief. During his MBA he landed at Monumental Sports & Entertainment in Washington, D.C., where he built a business-intelligence function and got a front-row seat to recap season. Then he moved to the brand side, started spending tens of millions on sponsorships, and discovered that all that spending bought him remarkably little in the way of answers.
The recurring thought - "there's got to be a better way to do it" - is the least original sentence a founder can utter, and also the only one that reliably starts a company. Kerr's advantage was that he had felt the problem from inside the team, inside the agency, and inside the brand. He recruited co-founders with engineering and operations depth, the kind of people who could turn a grievance into a product, and Trajektory was off.
The bet was specific and a little contrarian: don't build another broadcast tracker. Build the thing that measures the assets everyone else skipped, then put all of it - digital and decidedly non-digital - in one place.
You guys really get it - you understand what it was like to be in the trenches.
- What clients tell Alex Kerr, and the entire pitch in one line
The Product
One platform, twelve-plus kinds of proof
What Trajektory actually does is unglamorous in the way that all genuinely useful software is unglamorous: it aggregates. It pulls sponsorship performance data from across a dozen-plus asset categories - broadcast, streaming, social, in-venue LEDs, static signage, premium areas, email, web, mobile, radio - and stitches them into a single real-time picture. On top of that sits AI logo and brand detection, the computer-vision layer that watches video and counts exposures so a human doesn't have to.
The result is a dashboard where a sponsorship is finally legible end to end. Instead of reporting on the 15% of a portfolio that was easy, a team can report on close to 100% of it. Instead of one or two asset types, twelve. And the clients who switch tend to retire $100,000 or more in legacy vendor spend on the way in, which is the rare enterprise-software story where the new tool is both better and cheaper than the pile of things it replaces.
Before Trajektory vs. After
SELF-REPORTED CLIENT OUTCOMES · DIRECTIONAL, NOT AUDITED
Partners reported, before
The orange bars are the old way. They are longer, which in this one specific case is bad. Recap season did not survive the comparison.
The Proof
The customers are the kind who keep score for a living
It is one thing to claim you measure sponsorships well. It is another to have a list of clients whose entire profession is noticing when numbers are wrong. Trajektory's roster runs through the major leagues and into named teams - the Portland Timbers, Indianapolis Colts, Pittsburgh Penguins, Seattle Seahawks, Dallas Stars, Chicago Sky - alongside Fortune 500 brands on the buying side.
The $8M raise in May 2026 added a different kind of validation. Money from TechOperators, Mudita, Midwest Capital, and Bridge is a vote of financial confidence. Money from WISE Ventures - the investment arm of the NFL's Minnesota Vikings - is something closer to an endorsement from inside the industry being measured. When a team writes a check to the company that grades teams, the grading is presumably worth having.
Who buys it
Teams, leagues, events, agencies, and the brands footing the sponsorship bill - across NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, NWSL, WNBA and NCAA.
What they replace
Spreadsheets, manual logo counts, and a stack of single-purpose vendors - often $100K+ in legacy spend.
Who's investing
TechOperators, Mudita, Midwest Capital, Bridge, and the Vikings' WISE Ventures across seed and Series A.
The competition
Relo Metrics, Nielsen Sports, SponsorUnited - mostly focused on the broadcast surfaces Trajektory goes beyond.
In a market where stability and reliable data are paramount, this funding validates our deliberate, sustainable growth strategy.
- Alex Kerr, Founder & CEO
The Mission
Stress-free data, said without irony
Trajektory describes its mission as giving sponsorship teams stress-free, real-time data that visualizes, assesses, and accurately values every partnership asset. "Stress-free" is a bold word to attach to data work, and the company seems to mean it as a literal product spec rather than a slogan - the entire point is to remove the spring panic from the calendar.
Underneath the convenience pitch is a sturdier idea about integrity. If you can measure all of a sponsorship honestly, you can finally tell a partner where they are winning and where they are wasting money. That makes renewals defensible, pricing fairer, and the whole category a little less like faith and a little more like arithmetic. For an industry that runs on relationships and gut, that is a quiet kind of radicalism.
We're trying to help people understand where they're succeeding, and where they're failing.
- Alex Kerr
Why It Matters Tomorrow
The number on the check keeps climbing
Sponsorship spending is not shrinking. New leagues, women's sports finally getting the investment they were owed, streaming deals, retail media bleeding into venues - the surfaces a brand can buy keep multiplying, and every new surface is a new thing nobody knows how to value. The measurement problem does not get solved once. It gets bigger every season.
That is the long tailwind behind Trajektory's plan to spend its new capital on engineering, sales, and deeper AI. The more granular the data and the smarter the detection, the more of that expanding, messy, non-digital sponsorship world becomes countable. Which brings us back to that Chicago office.
The sponsorship director is still there. It is still spring. But the forty browser tabs are gone, the vendor portals are retired, and the spreadsheet that should have been deleted years ago finally was. The logo on the jersey, the board, the email - all of it already counted, in real time, while she was asleep. Recap season used to be a season. Trajektory turned it into a dashboard.
sponsorship analyticsai logo detectionsports tech
media valuationreal-time reportingchicago
b2b saasbrand exposuresponsorship roi
