Investor directory

Techstars

Techstars Central LLC, founded in 2006 and based in Boulder, Colorado, operates as a startup accelerator and venture capital firm focused on supporting early-stage technology-oriented companies. It specializes in a mentorship-driven accelerator program, selecting ten startups each summer to participate in a three-month incubation period, offering funding of $120,000 in exchange for equity. Techstars invests primarily in sectors such as fintech, artificial intelligence, blockchain, augmented reality, and IoT, while avoiding investments in medical devices, healthcare technology, and local service-oriented businesses. In addition to its primary accelerator, Techstars has various specialized programs, including those focused on music, retail, mobility, and social impact, with global reach extending to regions such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The firm prefers taking minority stakes, typically between six and ten percent, without seeking board representation or investor rights. Techstars has built a robust network of entrepreneurs, mentors, and corporate partners to foster innovation and growth within its portfolio, which includes over 1,000 companies with a significant collective market capitalization.

Focus

Pre Seed RoundSeed RoundArtificial IntelligenceMachine LearningSeries AShow more
http://techstars.com/ventures
https://crunchbase.com/organization/techstars
https://facebook.com/techstars
https://linkedin.com/company/techstars
https://twitter.com/techstars
https://www.capitaliq.com/CIQDotNet/company.aspx?companyId=431767203
https://www.privateequityinternational.com/database/#/profile?id=14977

Ethan Austin

MD of the Techstars Western Union Accelerator

Mark Tortorella

Advisor

Nathanial Zola

MD

Past deals in Sports

Breakthru

Seed Round in 2021
SportsHi connects student-athletes to colleges and amazing opportunities like scholarships. Our mission is to encourage high school students to play sports by creating a community where all student-athletes can grow. We know the positive impact high school sports can have in the classroom and in your day-to-day life. By creating SportsHi, we want to send more of our youth to higher education.

WePlayed

Seed Round in 2021
WePlayed is an intelligent college sports video platform that enriches and activates post-game content to help schools drive sponsorships and amplify community engagement. WePlayed works with athletes, coaches, fans, teams, clubs, leagues, conferences, colleges, rights holders, brands, and other sports sponsors. The company is poised to transform the sports experience for millions of people worldwide by allowing them to discover, personalize and share their favorite moments from one of the richest video repositories across all sports. They consolidate, catalog, and activate previously unpublished and post-live broadcast sports video content that becomes idle after the competition ends. they extract viewable moments from games using machine learning-assisted crowdsourcing and advanced recognition technology. They continually enrich the content with sports contextual and player metadata to drive precision search, better recommendation engine performance, and increased viewing.

Ballbox

Pre Seed Round in 2021
Ballbox is a provider of logistics services focused on the rental of sports, technology, and leisure equipment. The company offers an innovative solar-powered vending system that allows tourists and residents to rent items such as footballs and beach chairs. By enabling customers to access packages purchased online, rent products for immediate use, and buy necessary items on the spot, Ballbox facilitates a convenient experience for users at various locations, including apartments, hotels, parks, and beaches. This approach not only enhances leisure activities but also supports retailers by allowing them to deliver their products directly to consumers.

Launchpad

Pre Seed Round in 2021
A complete system to get elite athletic training at home.

SportsIcon

Pre Seed Round in 2021
SportsIcon lets users connect with sportspeople through NFT’s and masterclasses.

Locker

Pre Seed Round in 2020
Locker is a platform which is changing the way fans globally consume sports media through personalization. By implementing deep machine-learning and trusted content aggregation, Locker provides users with a single app to find and consume the topics they love, from the media brands they trust. Fans can choose from hundreds of available media brands and thousands of topics to follow, and Locker conveniently finds the stories best suited to them. Locker also serves fans suggested bets based on their consumption interests from their own preferred sportsbook, bridging the gap between betting companies and media consumption.

ZoneIn

Pre Seed Round in 2020
Nearly every vertical within fitness and wellness is accelerating, from gear to on-demand exercise to recovery. Meanwhile nutrition is stuck in neutral and is often overlooked, despite the well documented impact it has on health and performance. Developed with sports scientists from the NBA and NFL, ZoneIn is the performance-focused nutrition app that meets the needs of all athletes.

gameSense Sports

Pre Seed Round in 2020
GameSense Sports offers software for Cognitive Sports Training, including Baseball Pitch Recognition. It uses validated techniques to make the most effective and efficient products on the market today at a fraction of the cost. Its goal is not to replicate the game experience but rather to accelerate “thinking without thinking” and fluid sports performance. Founded in 2015, GameSense is based in Denver, Colorado.

ELANATION

Seed Round in 2020
A mobile SaaS start-up revolutionising sports education for youth, globally. Problem worth solving: Fifty percent of children can no longer access extra-curricular sport on a regular basis. The modern family is juggling between double working parents, increased sport fees, travel time and more. This growing health problem is costing families $600B in health expenses per year. Solution: Democratised access to extra-curricular sports content and skills. We unite kids, coaches and content on a daily basis using the latest in mobile, IoT and Ai technology. Our north star: Give 1 billion children access to 1 million skills. Awards: - No.1 Founder in Asia Pacific, 2018 - Winner, People's Choice Wild Card TechCrunch Disrupt, San Francisco 2017, USA - Winner, People's Choice, National Internet of Things Summit, October 2016, Australia - Winner, StarUP, National Internet of Things Summit, October 2016, Australia - Winner, Best Lifestyle Consumer Technology, Overseas Talent and Entrepreneurship, Beijing 2016 - Winner, Australian Best Startup, Overseas Talent and Entrepreneurship Conference, APAC, July 2016 - Winner, Start Up China, Winner of Chengdu Innovate, Chengdu China, 2016

Game Theory

Pre Seed Round in 2020
Game Theory is a sports and tech startup that facilitates video-gaming like sporting experiences. Game Theory manages sports facilities that provide coaching programs to athletes and also offers free rental of badminton and squash equipment, operates chlorine tested swimming pools, enabling users to play, learn, and get coached at affordable rates. Game Theory was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in Bangalore, India.

The GIST

Pre Seed Round in 2019
The GIST is an audience engagement company focused on connecting and empowering underserved sports fans, particularly women, within the sports industry. Founded by women who recognized the lack of diversity and representation in sports conversations, The GIST addresses the challenges faced by fans who often feel excluded. By providing sports news, experiences, and a community tailored specifically for women, The GIST fosters a space where female fans can engage with sports on their terms. The company aims to level the playing field and ensure that all sports enthusiasts have the opportunity to participate in discussions and experiences that enrich their connection to the sports world.

Uncanny

Pre Seed Round in 2019
They are creating the gym equipment for eSports athletes. There are 100s of millions of dollars of prize money and celebrity level careers at stake in the industry, and they are on a mission to provide to the average amateur or competitive eSports gamer the tools they need to complete at that level.

GameOn

Pre Seed Round in 2019
Free and simple prediction games for the everyday fan. Download On iOS & Android | http://onelink.to/4z6mj3

Sporttrade

Pre Seed Round in 2019
Sporttrade operates a peer-to-peer marketplace for sports betting, allowing users to buy and sell outcomes of sporting events similarly to stock trading. This innovative platform enables participants to bet on and against various outcomes, set their own odds, and monitor their bets' performance in real-time. With a focus on efficiency, Sporttrade's patent-pending technology can process thousands of bets per second, significantly reducing delays commonly associated with traditional sportsbooks, which typically retain up to 10% of users' funds. In contrast, Sporttrade retains less than 1%, providing a more favorable experience for bettors. Users can also engage with friends, compete on leaderboards, and have opportunities to earn cash prizes.

WePlayed

Pre Seed Round in 2019
WePlayed is an intelligent college sports video platform that enriches and activates post-game content to help schools drive sponsorships and amplify community engagement. WePlayed works with athletes, coaches, fans, teams, clubs, leagues, conferences, colleges, rights holders, brands, and other sports sponsors. The company is poised to transform the sports experience for millions of people worldwide by allowing them to discover, personalize and share their favorite moments from one of the richest video repositories across all sports. They consolidate, catalog, and activate previously unpublished and post-live broadcast sports video content that becomes idle after the competition ends. they extract viewable moments from games using machine learning-assisted crowdsourcing and advanced recognition technology. They continually enrich the content with sports contextual and player metadata to drive precision search, better recommendation engine performance, and increased viewing.

Sixth Man

Pre Seed Round in 2019
There is a major disconnect between sports programs and the way they evaluate their players. The standard way of reading statistics that is used today, should be considered medieval. Using statistics the way we read them, we can discover value in players no one else can see.

FanPowered

Pre Seed Round in 2019
Fan Powered is a digital platform for fan-powered sports & entertainment. The platform allows fans to curate and fund the sporting competitions that they really want to see.

Playeasy

Pre Seed Round in 2019
Playeasy is an online platform that matches people looking for places to play with athletic facilities in their area. Built by athletes, coaches and facility managers that were frustrated with the current manual and painful process of finding a place to play, Playeasy's powerful and easy-to-use platform makes the process seamless. Whether you're looking for a field, diamond, court, rink or pool, Playeasy has you covered.

FanFest

Pre Seed Round in 2019
For all the sports teams / film studios / record labels with empty stadiums / theaters / concerts, we built FanFest, a "Twitch-in-a-box" platform with built-in merchandising and sponsorship for ticketed live events delivered virtually. Reach out for more info on how we're saving the $2.3T global entertainment industry here.

StatMuse

Series B in 2018
StatMuse Inc. is a San Francisco-based company that offers a cloud-based platform for analyzing sports statistics through artificial intelligence. Founded in 2014, StatMuse enables sports fans to explore and engage with data using natural language queries, allowing users to search for player statistics and interact with digital personas of renowned athletes. The platform combines AI with dynamic animation and augmented reality, creating an innovative environment for interactive storytelling in sports. Backed by prominent investors, including Disney and the NFL Players Association, StatMuse has established itself as a leader in conversational AI for sports, providing users with up-to-date scores, statistics, and original content related to their favorite teams and players.

Playfull

Convertible Note in 2017
Playfull tracks a gamer’s performance across several popular Esports games and sends them personalized, relevant rewards for meaningful achievements and wins. Playfull synthesizes gameplay data, demographic data, and redemption data to train a proprietary rewards engine to deliver the perfect reward to players at the perfect moment.

Play Impossible

Pre Seed Round in 2017
The Play Impossible Gameball™ is a multi-sport, mobile device-connected ball designed for indoor and outdoor recreational activities. The company has developed a smart, connected inflatable ball that looks completely normal from the outside but has a bevy of electronics inside — accelerator, barometer, microcontroller, ultracapacitor, etc. — and sends real-time data via Bluetooth to an accompanying iOS or Android smartphone app, which lets people play different games and record highlight videos. A charging stick gives the ball two hours of play in just 20 seconds.

Playfull

Pre Seed Round in 2017
Playfull tracks a gamer’s performance across several popular Esports games and sends them personalized, relevant rewards for meaningful achievements and wins. Playfull synthesizes gameplay data, demographic data, and redemption data to train a proprietary rewards engine to deliver the perfect reward to players at the perfect moment.

Electronic Gaming Federation

Seed Round in 2016
Electronic Gaming Federation, LLC operates as an electronic sports (eSports) organization that focuses on intercollegiate eSports competitions. The company runs eSports competitions; hosts tournaments; and produces related media, including live broadcasts of matches, eSports analysis, and news. It also runs college-exclusive events for teams in North America. Electronic Gaming Federation, LLC was founded in 2013 and is based in Rochester, New York.

TOK.tv

Series A in 2016
TOK.tv is a sports social network that allows millions of fans to talk to their friends, while watching a game on TV. It empowers teams and brands to talk to the fans, and monetize the game experience. The company joined Minerva Networks in August 2019. The TOK.tv Social Button powered the official Barcelona, Real Madrid, PSG, Juventus, and Los Angeles Clippers mobile apps. TOK.tv was headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in London, Milan, and Shanghai.

GoalShouter

Seed Round in 2016
GoalShouter Srl provides an iPhone and Android-based mobile communication tool for the soccer community. Its application enables users to report everything that happens on the field; create a professional-quality live coverage with graphic content, statistical reports, and more; and share the content on Facebook, Twitter, and their Websites. The company was founded in 2013 and is based in Milan, Italy.

Eversports

Seed Round in 2015
Eversports is a SaaS-enabled marketplace dedicated to simplifying access to sports facilities and activities. The platform connects sports enthusiasts directly with venues, enabling users to easily book courts and courses while facilitating the discovery of potential sports partners. Eversports aims to foster a unique community of sports enthusiasts, allowing members to engage with their passion for sports globally. By providing a comprehensive interface, Eversports ensures that users have all the necessary information to practice their favorite sports at their convenience.

StatMuse

Seed Round in 2015
StatMuse Inc. is a San Francisco-based company that offers a cloud-based platform for analyzing sports statistics through artificial intelligence. Founded in 2014, StatMuse enables sports fans to explore and engage with data using natural language queries, allowing users to search for player statistics and interact with digital personas of renowned athletes. The platform combines AI with dynamic animation and augmented reality, creating an innovative environment for interactive storytelling in sports. Backed by prominent investors, including Disney and the NFL Players Association, StatMuse has established itself as a leader in conversational AI for sports, providing users with up-to-date scores, statistics, and original content related to their favorite teams and players.

Jolt Athletics

Seed Round in 2015
Jolt Athletics Inc. designs and manufactures sensors to monitor sports head impacts in real-time. Its sensors monitor athletes head impacts in real time, streaming live data and alerts to connected smartphones. The company was incorporated in 2015 and is based in Saint Louis, Missouri.

StatMuse

Series A in 2015
StatMuse Inc. is a San Francisco-based company that offers a cloud-based platform for analyzing sports statistics through artificial intelligence. Founded in 2014, StatMuse enables sports fans to explore and engage with data using natural language queries, allowing users to search for player statistics and interact with digital personas of renowned athletes. The platform combines AI with dynamic animation and augmented reality, creating an innovative environment for interactive storytelling in sports. Backed by prominent investors, including Disney and the NFL Players Association, StatMuse has established itself as a leader in conversational AI for sports, providing users with up-to-date scores, statistics, and original content related to their favorite teams and players.

Sportsy

Seed Round in 2014
Sportsy is a mobile training platform that makes it fun for kids to learn, practice and become better at key skills in a variety of sports. Launching Sportsy Soccer in early 2014 in partnership with professional soccer players and top coaches, Sportsy is developing a series of training programs designed for players just starting out and those who want to take their skills to the next level. Using their iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad or Android device, players learn how to perform drills and take part in challenges to earn points and badges.

Gametime

Pre Seed Round in 2013
Gametime United, Inc. develops a mobile application to book tickets. The company’s application enables users to buy and sell tickets for NBA, NHL, MLB, MLS, NCAA, and NFL teams. It offers its application for iOS and Android platforms through App Store and the Google Play Store. The company was founded in 2012 and is based in San Francisco, California.

Playground Energy

Seed Round in 2013
Playground energy is developing ideas which are making outdoor games more fun, educational and functional. Our main focus is to utilize the energy created at outdoor playgrounds and to use it for interactive motivation of the kids without sacrificing the gaming experience.

Responsive Sports

Seed Round in 2013
Responsive Sports makes smart sports equipment. The idea behind Responsive Sports is that if sensors are added to sports equipment athletes will be able to get better information about their performance. In addition to selling sports equipment embedded with sensors, Responsive Sports can also power stats for televised professional sports.

CoachBase

Seed Round in 2013
CoachBase app aims to empower the sport coaches with tools and resources to get better. CoachBase built a platform for coaches and teams where they can communicate and share games effectively.There are 135 million kids participating in sports in the USA alone and each of them have a coach. Coachbase is what these people need for winning a game. Coachbase has already been used by an NBA team, featured in a movie, in WSJ and most recently in a Phil Jackson commercial.

Fancred

Seed Round in 2013
Fancred Inc. is a social platform designed for sports enthusiasts to enhance their sports credibility and connect with other fans. Founded in August 2012 and based in Brookline, Massachusetts, the platform allows users to share opinions, photos, videos, and articles related to their favorite sports. It facilitates the consumption of sports information and community interaction, enabling fans to capture and discuss their favorite sports moments. Through its mobile application, Fancred provides features that allow users to follow their preferred teams, access relevant content, and build their reputation within the fan community based on their passion and knowledge of sports.

Playground Energy

Seed Round in 2013
Playground energy is developing ideas which are making outdoor games more fun, educational and functional. Our main focus is to utilize the energy created at outdoor playgrounds and to use it for interactive motivation of the kids without sacrificing the gaming experience.

AppTheGame

Pre Seed Round in 2012
AppTheGame is an online sports platform that allows fans to talk about games and get news and stats. It allows fans to engage with other fans and uses proprietary algorithms to analyze stats, game info, social media, and play-by-play events to provide fans what they want, when they want it.

Playground Energy

Seed Round in 2012
Playground energy is developing ideas which are making outdoor games more fun, educational and functional. Our main focus is to utilize the energy created at outdoor playgrounds and to use it for interactive motivation of the kids without sacrificing the gaming experience.

TOK.tv

Pre Seed Round in 2012
TOK.tv is a sports social network that allows millions of fans to talk to their friends, while watching a game on TV. It empowers teams and brands to talk to the fans, and monetize the game experience. The company joined Minerva Networks in August 2019. The TOK.tv Social Button powered the official Barcelona, Real Madrid, PSG, Juventus, and Los Angeles Clippers mobile apps. TOK.tv was headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in London, Milan, and Shanghai.

Overtime

Seed Round in 2011
Overtime Sports Inc. is a New York-based company that focuses on enhancing the sports experience for younger audiences. Founded in 2016, it has developed an application that allows users to film and edit highlights of school and amateur sporting events, incorporating features like slow-motion to showcase key moments. This application enables users to create a professional-looking feed of sports content. In addition to its digital offerings, Overtime also markets a range of merchandise, including clothing items like skullies, socks, shirts, and snapbacks, through its online store. The company has garnered significant investment from notable venture capital firms and prominent figures in the sports industry.

StarStreet

Seed Round in 2010
StarStreet is a provider of a platform to play fantasy sports for money. It provides a stock-market styled platform enabling users to buy and sell shares on players, and to cash out at season's end. The platform is operable in the U.S. and Canada and provides contest opportunities in Major League Baseball (MLB), National Football League (NFL), and Canadian Football (CFB) leagues.

Plancast

Seed Round in 2010
The best way to discover events and activities with friends.