April 23 – Sportlobster, a social network for sports fans, has raised £2.2 million for a minority stake in the business from MBM Capital Partners and Wychwood Capital. The new money into the year old company will be used to update the website and app.
The next stage of the company’s development will be to launch a number of on-line games that it will be aiming to get some of its 700,000 users (Sportlobster’s figure) to pay to play.
Sportlobster will also offer users the ability to bet on matches using a virtual currency that can be topped up with real money.
This is the second time Wychwood Capital has put money into the company, having put in £620,000 last September following an initial £500,000 angel investment in April 2013 at start-up.
The company counts Michael Owen and Formula 1 driver Mark Webber as investors but no figure has been released for their investment.
The website and launched as a social media platform offering sports news and results updates with the ability to chat and comment in early 2013. The iPhone app launched in October of last year. Now the company is making its next move to expand its services across the 30-plus sports it covers.
Cracking the football market will be crucial to the success of the company long term and signing up playing talent to create profiles on the platform and attract users has been the Holy Grail of a number of similar social media ventures. The theory is good but the practicality of getting big name talent to commit to a social media platform is considerably more difficult in practice.
The company that has made the most in-roads in the area is WISeKey who have white labelled versions of their WISfans technology for FC Barcelona and Brazil’s Flamengo among others. Their proposition is based on (and really the by-product of) the backbone of a digital information security, authentication, and identity management business.
The Sportlobster platform looks remarkably similar to the PlayUp platform that has been in the marketplace for three years. Sportlobster looks to be evolving along similar lines.
Founder Andy Meikle made a big boast to the Daily Telegraph last September that “we intend to move the conversation away from Twitter. In five years, every sports personality, broadcaster and sports fan will be on the network.”
It is a boast that has been heard from others many times before. While the jury is still very much out in terms of acceptance of sports social media platforms the principle is still attractive as an idea and, clearly, an investment opportunity.
The danger for this fledgling sector is that the football world in particular (big name players and big name clubs) are too slow to adopt the platform, leaving the companies and their investors with a technology looking for an application.
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