Greek Venture Capital(VC) Metavallon invested €250Κ in the SportTech app Raceckeck in a pre-seed investment round, Metavallon reported. The funding will be used to scale the Racecheck’s technology, to add new features to the platform, to strengthen the team and further expand to the US market and in Europe.
The investment comes as a response to the very dysfunctional, yet booming digital sports industry. According to Metavallon’s estimation, the sports tourism industry is $40 billion worth, but the market proofs to be very fragmented. Hence their investment in Racecheck, the platform that strives to aggregate all relevant features for athletes in one app.
“The sports tourism industry is booming in Europe at the moment. Racecheck adds a lot of value to recreational athletes by facilitating a seamless experience in booking events and related activities and strong user-generated content that is hard to replicate. We look forward to supporting the company as it establishes its leading aggregator position in Europe and next in the US”, says Myrto Papathanou, Partner at Metavallon VC.
Founded in 2013 in the UK by the Greek siblings Alexander and Katerina Tanti, Racecheck is an online platform that helps recreational athletes to find and evaluate endurance sports events around the world. Reportedly, today the platform is used by tens of thousands of athletes not only to find races but to share and benefit from their past participant reviews. In order to improve their app, Racecheck recently launched their website, and by the end of the month, they plan to launch new updated version of their iOS and Android app, as well to diversify their offers in respect to event participation, thus enabling the users to share race calendars, reviews and finish times. Reportedly the startup goal is to gradually develop a specialized channel of distribution and interaction between organizers of competitions, insurance companies, sports companies, B2B suppliers and athletes.
“Despite the size of the market and impressive global growth rates, endurance sports participation remains an incredibly fragmented process. Racecheck is here to organize this process, and make it easy for athletes to find their perfect race and cross that finish line”, states Racecheck’s co-founder Alexander Tanti.
“This first investment comes at a great time to allow us to build out marketing activities, increase engagement with social functions, and introduce new features around social connectivity and seamless race and event-related accommodation bookings,” he added.
Besides Metavallon as a leading investor, the investment round was also supported by Chris McCormack, twice world champion Ironman and co-founder of Super League Triathlon. According to him Racecheck is a great source of assessment for athletes and give real value to the organizers and the athletes.
“It is striking how the right technology in sport can help link people and communities and attract even more people to the amazing world of endurance struggles. The development of Racecheck as a source of assessment for athletes is so striking and there is an amazing opportunity in front of us to give real value to both the organizers and the athletes. People who passionately create can change the world”.
About the invewstor – Metavallon VC
Metavallon is a €32 million venture capital firm that specializes in seed stage funding for technology companies. The firm engages at the very early stage and funds companies that will operate at the forefront of business and technology innovation. Beginning with an acceleration phase, founders connect with experts, mentors, experienced entrepreneurs, industry partners and investors that help grow their companies. Mewtavallon’s mission is to invest in and work alongside ambitious entrepreneurs, helping them build transformational businesses across multiple stages, geographies and industries.