ScorePlay raises $5m seed round led by Seven Seven Six
ScorePlay has raised a $5m seed round, led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, bringing its total funding to $6.5m. The company provides sports organisations worldwide with an AI-powered media infrastructure as teams and athletes enter a new era of fan content consumption.
Following in the footsteps of Eintracht Frankfurt’s Mario Götze (with Companion-M), NBA All-Star Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman’s 35V invested alongside Manchester United’s Raphaël Varane and Philadelphia Union’s Alejandro Bedoya as they also saw ScorePlay’s potential within football. Additionally, 2020 US Open Champion Dominic Thiem has also joined the round.
On the tech spectrum, entering alongside Alexis Ohanian and Seven Seven Six, are Renaud Visage, co-founder of Eventbrite, the largest event technology company in the world, and Alex Yazdi, co-founder and CEO of Voodoo, the French mobile game unicorn. Finally, to guide them in the SaaS and creator economy, ScorePlay received investment from several founders of Jellysmack (Michael Philippe, Robin Sabban), as well as the three co-founders of Hexa (formerly eFounders) Thibaud Elzière, Quentin Nickmans and Amaury Sepulchre, a group of entrepreneurs with significant experience in US growth.
ScorePlay experienced the huge shift in sports consumption growing up as sports fans. In a non-stop digital world, sports fans are no longer fully satisfied with the unilateral broadcast narrative and need constant authentic content from clubs, leagues and competitions. Co-founders Victorien Tixier and Xavier Green were inspired to build ScorePlay when they realised the chaos of media management in sports was blocking this content at scale in a $240bn sports market. They used AI to automate the management and distribution of photos and videos to enable athletes and clubs to tell the stories they wanted in real time, and now work across over 30 different sports.
“Sports teams have seen a meteoric rise over the past 20 years, but their media infrastructures just haven’t been able to keep up – they’re still using Google Drive, Dropbox and WhatsApp. We saw that gap grow so we went directly to the end-user and co-constructed a tech solution made for the sports industry. ScorePlay is built by and for sports organisations, which is one of the main reasons it has been hugely successful,” said Victorien Tixier, CEO of ScorePlay (pictured).
In 2022, ScorePlay’s revenue grew 1000% and in less than two years over 120 sports organisations, including the Swiss Football League, MotoGP (Dorna), Sacramento Kings (NBA), West Ham United (Premier League), Atlético de Madrid (La Liga), Major League Pickleball and 16 MLS and NWSL teams (including Angel City, Portland Thorns, Nashville SC, OL Reign and Inter Miami), have signed up to use the platform. Today, more than 10,000 athletes, including Lionel Messi, Alex Morgan, Declan Rice and Megan Rapinoe, receive their content automatically through the ScorePlay Athlete App, to build their own brands like never before.
The investment will help ScorePlay grow its tech team, expand its New York office and consolidate the company’s position as the go-to media solution in sports.