New technology from startup ventures is transforming the global sports industry. This Startup Series has introduced over 200 startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience by allowing Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story and pitch their idea. Feel free to submit your startup’s answers to the below questions or contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for inclusion in this series.
Company name: Athlenda S.A
Founder(s): Lazaros Papadopoulos, Nikos Sfingos, Manolis Tsagkaridis, Eugenia Zachariadou
Headquarters: Athens, Greece
1. What is your elevator pitch?
Athlenda is a global recruitment platform for athletes based on video highlights. With the use of a Video Analysis tool, it encourages young players to showcase their strengths in order to get tracked by scouts, agents, clubs and colleges.
2. Problem & Solution
Talent Scouting has always been a costly and time-consuming process, especially for recruiting U20 young players, for whom publicly available information is virtually non-existent. Young athletes worldwide face a massive challenge in career progression because of how difficult it is to have reliable access to sports scouts, including agents, teams, colleges or coaches who struggle to find talent while minimizing cost and failure rates.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
Starting from basketball, there are more than 25M registered players in the world, under the age of 20 years old (the undiscovered zone). In soccer, this number goes up to 100M. On the other side, there are about 13.000 teams (Clubs div. A & B and US Colleges div. I & II) that are looking to recruit on average 3-4 rookies / year. Calculating those figures, every year 3.000 athletes compete for a single opening!
4. Business Model – how do you make money and what has been your revenue to date?
Free with premium subscription plans for promotional services to athletes and for search and scouting services to teams, colleges, scouts and coaches. Athlenda has, so far, run a test launch for the planned paid services, less than 2 months ago and got 50 paid users so far. The full packages are under development.
5. Management Team – with titles
Lazaros Papadopoulos (CEO):
Lazaros is a former professional basketball player of seventeen years in European Leagues, nine years international in the Greek National Team, blessed to obtain a total of 10 titles with no less than five at a European level. After completing his career as a player, he decided to match up his enthusiasm and knowledge for sports and business development.
Nikos Sfingos (Senior Technical Lead):
Nikos holds an academic and professional background of physical education and computer science and has established a 20 years career in the sports software industry. His scouting software was proudly introduced and used by “Athens 2004” Olympics. This software’s core technology is now evolving into “Athlenda”.
Manolis Tsagkaridis (COO)
Manolis is a business executive with profound inside knowledge of local and European market. Acting for several years as president of an international organization he has gained a vast experience in international agreements, developing marketing strategies and global trademark management.
Eugenia Zachariadou (Marketing Lead):
Eugenia is a marketing enthusiast, holding a Bachelor’s in Business Administration and an MA in Marketing Management, with a decade-long career in on all aspects of Marketing, from marketing research, event management and PR, to trade marketing, e-commerce and digital.
6. Financial needs: are you currently looking for investment? Have you raised investment already? If so, who are your investors?
We are looking to raise $2.5m to scale in international markets, beginning from US. The funding to date is 290.000€, out of which 190.000€ is self-funded and 100.000€ was raised from two angel investors (Theodoros Papaloukas and Kostas Papanikolaou – both professional basketball players).