The Breakdown

On this day, 5 years ago, we were building and pre-selling our beta product in parallel, hoping to launch in early 2018. Today, we serve over 2,900 brands and property partners in 25 countries. I'm incredibly excited to announce that we've partnered with Spectrum Equity to help SponsorUnited continue on its path toward empowering every buyer, seller and collaborator with the most intelligent marketing partnership data available anywhere.

Spectrum Equity will invest $35 million for a minority stake in SponsorUnited. Along with their investment, Spectrum brings tremendous experience and expertise as we focus on providing more value to more organizations at speed, scale and depth.

First, a little background

We've always believed our bootstrapping mentality gave us an edge in creative problem-solving and drove us to be highly disciplined in how and why we made decisions. It also helped instill a financially prudent mentality focusing first on quality, uniqueness and impact of the data on our customers, wrapped in a user experience that made their jobs as easy and effective as possible. From there, we were able to naturally expand our platform across brands, media and non-sports events and entities, both domestically and globally.

This diversification and breadth of customers provided a tremendous feedback loop for product enhancements and a real-time understanding across a broad set of client challenges, allowing us to quickly react, build and deliver expanded and improved products and services to current customers. Ultimately, this led to significant net customer and revenue retention, allowing us to underwrite our own investment in growth.

So you might ask, why are we raising and why now?

Sponsorships are becoming increasingly complex and in-demand ??

SponsorUnited was originally built on the thesis that if one could in theory collect, standardize and democratize access to all of the previously inaccessible information on sponsorship deals everywhere, then everyone would want and need that to be smarter, faster and more connected in an increasingly competitive space. We wanted to unlock value for all participants.

We've now recognized that the level of marketing and sales complexity is accelerating and expanding all at once, making it increasingly hard for executives in this space to keep up. We want to make sure we're ahead of this acceleration.

1. The number of ways for a brand to reach a fan is expanding and diversifying - Athlete Name/Image/Likeness, TikTok, Metaverse, Streaming ads and new sports (e.g., Pickleball) are just a few of the innumerable ways in which a brand can now reach passionate consumers. This leads to buyers having to quickly become experts in areas of less familiarity to stay competitive.
2. New sponsor entrants - led by category disruptors - are redefining traditional partnerships - Crypto, NFT's, CBD, endless technology micro-categories and others are forcing rights-holders to reassess category exclusivities, redefining the competitive landscape and challenging the status quo.
3. Live events, personalities and sports media are demanding increased consideration - Sports and entertainment is being leverage more than ever to gain greater share of attention and value signaling in an increasingly fragmented advertising environment.

We want to continue building the most intelligent and connected platform for marketing partnership executives ??

1. Deeper insights that matter - Beyond "who and what", we'll bring the "why and how" behind successful partnerships and pushing those reports directly to those who want and need it in the moment.
2. Rapidly expand data and update information that matters - Whether it's global, local, across an emerging marketing platform or across an organization's profile, delivering the most accurate and complete information to our users is how we help put them in a position to win.
3. A more customized user interface and notifications - As we expand our reports and information, we recognize that executives need a quick and easy way to get to the data that matters. We're working on making the platform and information as easy to navigate as possible, while also pushing information out that you as an individual may want and need.

We're building something very special ??

At our core, we want to lean into really hard to solve problems and hard to find data, that if delivered, can create a monumental impact on one's business. We've identified one of those moonshots and are excited about the progress made and the supreme value it will bring to so many. While it's a bit early for us to discuss now, we'll be coming out with more updates over the next few months, with a launch scheduled for the first half of 2023.

In the meantime, we're going to continue building on the tremendous foundation that's been set, recruiting talent to add to our world-class team across several different departments. For those interested, please check in for opportunities at using the below link.

We're bringing on an amazing strategic investment team ??

One of the great benefits of running a fundraising process is you learn a tremendous amount about your own business through the lens of others. And in that process, one firm stood head and shoulders above all others in their knowledge, experience and understanding of our space: Spectrum Equity. Well beyond their investment, we became increasingly excited with the opportunity to leverage their tremendous experience and guidance to help take SponsorUnited to the next level.

With that, we're excited to add Chris Mitchell (Managing director of Spectrum Equity) to our board of directors, joining SponsorUnited Chief Operating & Technology Officer, Alain Benzaken and myself.

Lastly, a giant thank you, from us to you ??

The entire SponsorUnited team couldn’t be more thrilled and thankful for the continued support of our amazing partners – We love to learn and be challenged by you each and every day and we're lucky to be on this journey alongside of you all.