Tag Archives: funding

Arkero Announces $6 Million Pre Seed Funding Round, Partnerships with major MLS, NWSL and EFL teams

Arkero, a new platform using all aspects of Artificial Intelligence to effectively run the day-to-day operations of complex organizations in sport, today announced a $6 million pre-seed funding round, and early partnerships with professional sports organizations across MLS, NWSL, and the English Football League.

The round was led by Roger Ehrenberg at Game Changers Ventures, with participation from Alexis Ohanian (776), David Tisch (BoxGroup), Garuda Ventures, Founders’ Co-op and strategic investors including Adrian Hanauer of the Seattle Sounders and Seattle Reign.

Arkero’s first partners include the Seattle Sounders, Seattle Reign, San Diego FC and Bolton Wanderers FC. Initial deployments focus on integrating AI into matchday planning and season-ticket renewals to help teams streamline coordination, reduce manual work, and operate with greater clarity across disconnected tools.

In early deployments, the Sounders and Reign project over 50% improvement in efficiency savings around matchday planning in 2026 alone, driven by reduced manual work, faster decision-making, and fewer operational errors.

Arkero centralizes operational data, workflows, and decisions into a single system, allowing business teams to plan, execute, and adapt in real time – without adding headcount or new layers of complexity. Because it is being built by operators who have run clubs themselves, Arkero reflects the realities of sports businesses: small teams, complex events, constant deadlines, and no margin for error. As a result, teams gain back time, clarity, and confidence – and can focus on growing the business rather than managing around broken processes.

“I own a football club. I’ve sat in the meetings, lived the chaos, and felt the cost of running a business on Excel and email,” said Shivaas Gulati, CEO of Arkero, “ The opportunity exists because this is broken from the inside.”

After leaving Remitly, the company he co-founded in 2022, Gulati joined the ownership group of English club Southend United FC, a 119-year-old club competing in the National League. Drawing on his hands-on experience from Southend United – and advising organizations such as the Seattle Sounders – Gulati has applied the operational discipline and best practices developed at Remitly to the global sports industry, a market exceeding $500 billion annually.

“On and off the pitch, our business is about constantly looking ahead to identify what we can do better and how we can use technology and the right partners to gain a competitive edge,” said Sounders FC majority owner Adrian Hanauer. “Our investment in Arkero is aligned with this approach, accounting for not just where we are as an organization today, but where we need to be going forward.”

“We made intentional decisions to prioritize how our teams could be optimized through AI,”said Hugh Weber, President and Chief Business Officer of Sounders FC. “Partnering with Shivaas and the Arkero team allowed us to embed AI into our operating system rather than layering on software which has made the technology a durable part of our culture.”

“We look for companies that have a clear grasp of where both sports and business are headed, near term and long term,” said Roger Ehrenberg of Game Changers Ventures. “While many are still debating how AI fits into real business solutions, Arkero is delivering tangible results. They’ve already demonstrated real impact with partners like the Sounders and the Reign, and we’re proud to support them as they scale.”

“My biggest surprising launching Angel City FC was how devoid of tech the industry of sports was – all of my teams and my league are now supported by an operating system I’ve designed – but I know this isn’t an option for every owner and Arkero is building the must-have software teams need.” said Alexis Ohanian of 776. “If you’re hesitating to adopt AI, you’re already falling behind.”

Arkero is led by Gulati, Vamsi Narla, who leads product and engineering and Daniel Shi, who oversees business operations. The founding team spent nearly a decade together at Remitly, which went on to a successful $8B IPO on the Nasdaq.

ZenSports Closes Additional $770K+ in Seed Funding

It’s been a busy 12 months for ZenSports, the mobile peer-to-peer sports betting marketplace where anyone can create and accept sports bets with anyone else in the world without the need for a centralized bookmaker.

After launching its sports betting app in March 2019, the fast-growing startup closed $675K in October 2019 as part of a broader $1M+ Seed Round. With its continued rapid growth, the startup started receiving inbound interest from additional angel investors in December 2019, and decided to open up a new round of funding to accommodate those interested investors. In just 10 weeks since then, the company syndicated and closed an additional $770K+ in funding across multiple angel investors.

Here’s how this new funding round played out according to ZenSports Co-Founder & CEO, Mark Thomas, “After officially closing our $1M+ Seed Round in October 2019, we felt more than comfortable that we had enough funding to execute on our growth strategy for 2020. However, we had numerous angel investors who approached us about putting more money into our company. We decided to offer a time-boxed raise without a target amount for these investors who approached us and shared our vision of how decentralized, peer-to-peer sports betting using cryptocurrencies was the future. We were fortunate to have a lot of choices in the investors we decided to ultimately bring on board, and we’re thrilled to be working with them as we continue to grow and scale ZenSports.”

ZenSports

The new funding will be heavily invested into paid customer acquisition channels. According to Thomas, “Up to this point, we haven’t spent any money on paid marketing to acquire new customers. Instead, we’ve focused on optimizing the post-customer acquisition and retention funnel through constant product iteration and via our SPORTS Rewards Program. We’ve got incredibly loyal customers who are very active on a daily basis in placing bets in our app. It’s now time to get very aggressive in growing our overall customer base via paid marketing.”

To help accomplish this, the company recently hired an experienced marketer, Mark Saldana, to become the company’s new Chief Marketing Officer. Mark brings a wealth of digital marketing experience to technology and consumer brands and will be an integral piece to the company’s revenue and growth plans.