Irish sports start-up Locker has secured more than €1 million as part of a fundraising round on Spark Crowdfunding.
The Galway-based start-up set a goal of €1 million on the site, but has already exceeded that with several days left to run on the campaign.
The company, which was previously described by investors as “Spotify for sport”, plans to use the funding to add new features to its service, including video, expand its engineering team and increase the quality of the product
Founded in 2020 by Ross O’Dwyer, Brian Quinn, Andrew Pierse and Matt Steerman, the Locker app provides a single platform for fans to consume content on their favourite sports and teams from sources they trust.
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The platform uses machine learning and trusted aggregation to compile content from hundreds of publishers. It covers a range of sports, from soccer, rugby, GAA and golf, to growing sports such as esports and cycling.
“Conceptually, putting all your sport in one has always been our goal as a founding team, so we’re going to continue to deploy that into engineering, adding video and live sport into the app, releasing enhanced data, statistics, audio,” he said. “A lot of users have requested integration of sports betting, which is an interesting one, as we have to be open to what our users want.”
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Some of those new features could appear before the end of the year, he said, with work ongoing into enhancing features and improving the back end systems.
The crowd funding brings to more than €2 million the total raised by the company to date. A previous funding round in 2021 was led by Techstars Sports and the Western Development Commission, along with a range of media and technology investors from across the US and Europe.
“What was interesting about crowd raising is the concept of advocacy and really getting users involved in the company and in the product,” said Mr O’Dwyer. “That concept of advocacy, and also allowing our users to be engaged with us as a founding team.”
Mr O’Dwyer said the company was considering making the crowdfunding an element of future funding rounds.
