Fantom is Topps for soccer stickers

Our national soccer team wasn’t the only Irish group helping the Football Association in England celebrate its 150th anniversary.

Irish technology company Fantom has scored a deal with Topps, which specialises in sticker albums and collection cards, to provide a white-label digital football product to celebrate the FA's landmark birthday.

Fantom is on a roll, having also closed a €370,000 follow-on funding round this week to boost its sales capacity and expand its team in Galway. It was led by the AIB Seed Capital Fund and included existing investors, Bloom Equity, Kevin Neary and Enterprise Ireland, as well as new private backers.

Neary, who founded Gamesworld in 1994 and sold it on to GameStop Corp to become a multi-millionaire, has also agreed to step up to the role of chairman.

Momentum
"I saw something in Fantom early on in 2011," Neary told One More Thing. "The whole momentum of games was towards online, and they had a compelling early stage story. I look forward to what we can achieve now that the market is opening up."

Fantom was a DCU Ryan Academy start-up and chief executive Paul Healy said it now wants to kick on by selling into the UK and the US. It will double its workforce to eight this year and hopes to add another five positions in 2014.

Digital collecting is forecast to become a $200 million industry by 2015, according to research consultancy Superdata. The customer base is typically male and in their early twenties.

“Digital collecting has exploded onto the casual games scene in the last year,” Healy said. “So our timing has been great, and we are seeing strong market momentum.”