The Hamburg-based sport marketing startup Sponsoo has raised €300,000 from four business angels and previous shareholders. The young company was founded in 2014 with the goal to fully digitalize the sport sponsorship industry by connecting athletes, clubs and sponsors on a full-service online marketplace.
Sponsoo CEO Andreas Kitzing explains: “We take a grassroots approach to disrupt the sponsorship industry. We started with helping out small amateur teams and hobby athletes and worked our way up to first division clubs, Olympic Gold Medal winners and large associations. Our goal is to give all of them equal access to the professional sport sponsorship market. This creates an exceptionally large and diversified portfolio that gives advertisers the possibility to run marketing campaigns in any area of sports.”
Until now, Sponsoo was financed by EU grants, recurring revenues and prizes from startup competitions such as Microsoft’s “Do Great Things” campaign. The newly raised financing alows the founding team to take Sponsoo to the next level. The fresh capital is designated for hiring further sales employees and developers in Sponsoo’s headquarter in Hamburg and to ramp up marketing.
The Sponsoo team observes an increasing demand for sponsorship cooperations. According to the Sponsoo CEO Andreas Kitzing, more and more marketing decision makers realize that sport sponsorship is a valuable tool even beyond classic formats such as Bundesliga (German soccer league) or TV sponsorships.
He says: “The digitaliziation and the democratization of media creates new possibilities for cooperations with sports people as influencers, brand ambassadors; and Sponsoo is the most efficient tool to put ideas into practice. The funding round will help us to increase efficiency even further. We’re excited that so many people believe in our vision as well, and are even willing to back that up by investing a significant amount of their own money.”
