Victorien
Tixier

After a professional sports match, someone has to deal with the photos. Not the three that make the highlight reel - the ten thousand that do not. A photographer shoots the whole game, dumps a memory card, and a communications team spends the evening squinting at frames: which player is that, which sponsor logo is visible, which of these can go to the athlete, which to the broadcaster, which to the brand that paid to be on the boards. It is tedious, it is time-sensitive, and for years it was done by hand. Victorien Tixier built the software that does it instead.

Tixier is the co-founder and chief executive of ScorePlay, a New York company whose platform ingests a team's media, tags the players and sponsors automatically, and pushes the results out to everyone who needs them. "Clubs were lacking tools to manage all the media content that they were creating," he has said, which is the kind of plain sentence that hides how large the problem turned out to be. By early 2025 more than 300 professional sports organizations were running their content operations on ScorePlay - the NBA and WNBA, Premier League and LaLiga and Bundesliga clubs, the NHL, and in American soccer essentially the entire map: MLS, the NWSL, Concacaf.

The origin is smaller than the customer list suggests. Tixier studied business at HEC Paris, with a stint as a visiting student at Trinity College Dublin, and then did the thing a lot of ambitious business students do, which is fly to the United States for an internship. His happened to be with Sofive Soccer Centers, a five-a-side soccer chain. There he built an automated system to record recreational matches - cameras that captured amateurs playing pickup football and turned it into watchable video. That is the whole seed. Everything after it is the same idea applied to progressively more important games.

Two companies, one thread

Before ScorePlay there was Hydra, which Tixier co-founded and which built what has been described as the first digital suite for five-a-side football centers. It was acquired in July 2022. Somewhere in that arc he met Xavier Green, an engineer who became ScorePlay's co-founder and CTO. "I met my co-founder Xav, who has an engineering background," Tixier has said, "we wanted to do a bigger thing in sports." They started ScorePlay in January 2021. The bigger thing was not a bigger camera. It was the realization that the bottleneck had moved: teams were now producing more content than they could organize, and the value was leaking out of the gap between shooting and publishing.

The product's early version was, in Tixier's telling, "a simple photo management tool." The rebrand that followed - which he led - reframed it as "an end-to-end media infrastructure that meets the complex needs of larger organizations," with AI tagging, live broadcast integrations, and automated distribution. The distinction matters more than it sounds. A photo tool is a nice-to-have. Infrastructure is the thing a media business cannot run without, and Tixier is insistent that modern sports teams are media businesses. "Sports remain the king of the content," he says. "At the end of the day, they are media businesses that have to maximize the monetization of their IP."

Boring, profitable, growing

What is unusual about ScorePlay is not the AI - everyone has AI now - but the shape of the business underneath it. At the time of its Series A the company said it was profitable, growing roughly threefold year over year, and keeping 100 percent of its customers. Those are three numbers that rarely appear together, and almost never in a sentence that also contains the words "raising venture capital." Most AI startups pick one of profitability, growth, or retention and hope investors do not ask about the other two. ScorePlay reported all three and then raised anyway.

The raise, announced in February 2025, was $13 million, bringing total funding to around $20 million. The lead names were Harry Stebbings' 20VC and Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six, with BYL Ventures and others alongside. But the part that made the round legible to the sports world was the athletes on the cap table: Giannis Antetokounmpo, the NBA MVP; Alex Morgan, the World Cup winner and former USWNT captain; and Nico Rosberg, the Formula 1 champion. It is a rare investor list that could field a team across three sports. The subtext is that the people whose images ScorePlay organizes were willing to bet on it.

There is a tidy detail in the Ohanian connection: Seven Seven Six's world encountered ScorePlay as a customer before it became an investor. That sequence - paid for the product first, bought the equity second - is the kind of thing founders usually can only dream of engineering, and it says more about the product than a pitch deck would. Tixier's summary of the value is characteristically undramatic. The platform saves time, he says: communications and marketing teams "don't have to tag anything." Once the tagging is automatic, the content moves faster, and the results show up in the metric he likes to cite - a reported 150 percent increase in player posts within two hours of a game.

What comes next

Tixier talks about moving ScorePlay further down the media value chain, past management and into monetization: licensing, transaction tracking, and new ways for teams to turn their archives into revenue. "Our mission remains to equip our clients with the essential tools to efficiently manage and monetize their media content," he says. The vertical strategy that won soccer - pick a category, sign every entity in it, move to the next - is the same one being pointed at the rest of professional sport. In 2025 he and Green landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Sports list, which is the sort of recognition that tends to arrive right when a company stops being an experiment and starts being infrastructure.