Scoreplay: Centralising Sports Media in the Age of AI

Speaker A: Foreign. Hello, and welcome to the Sportsloft podcast, where we talk to the people who are driving innovation across the world of sports media and entertainment. As usual, I'm joined today by Sportsloft's head of strategy, Andy Selby. So, uh, hey Andy, how you doing?

Speaker B: Good to be here, Charlie. I'm excited for a trip to the US Next week and glad we've got this one scheduled in just before.

Speaker A: Yes, we can do the editing to the podcast on the plane. Sounds about right. And we're also in very good company this afternoon as we're joined by Victorian, uh, Tixier, CEO at scoreplay, which is, um, an AI powered media management platform that simplifies content workflows for sports teams, broadcasters and athletes. Victorian will tell us exactly what that means. So, Victorian, welcome to the Sportsloft podcast.

Speaker C: Thanks, Ali, uh, and great to join you. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Right now, SchoolPlay is just coming off a $13 million fundraising round with a host of a very high Prof. VC funds and athlete investors, and we're definitely going to be getting into that. And it's also, I think, fair to say that School, uh Play's been hoovering up clients in the last few months, which is something that we really want to understand more about and why that's been happening. But first off, Victorian, tell us, what is scoreplay? Talk us through the product and what did you see in the sort of the workflows of sports organizations that really needed addressing when you were coming up with the idea of building scoreplay?

Speaker C: Yeah, sure, happy to. So to understand Scorplay, it's important to just go back into the context of the broader sports industry. So obviously teams, leagues, broadcasters are all fighting and pressure to produce more and more content over the years and on an increasing number of platforms. So it's not only broadcast, it's broadcast in many different countries. It's not only a few digital channels, it's like uh, dozens of them now and again, like in different languages too. And so the need for scoreplay was to say all that content that is getting produced today is fragmented across like very different platforms. So when you go to a team, a league, a broadcaster, they are using like sometimes 5, 6, 7 different tools to centralize those photos, those broadcast footage, those social media videos. And with Core Play, what we did was to centralize all of that into one single environment where all the content is centralized but also indexed automatically. So we are leveraging a lot of AI to do facial detection, brand logo detection, speech to text, now dubbing, like the things that can Help you repurpose the contents to use it in different channels. And once everything is centralized and indexed, we then distribute it to the right people. Um, and in sports you have so many different stakeholders that need access to very different types of content. So we have a, an athlete app, we have uh, platforms and portals for brands and partners. We have a direct access to the live feed directly in Adobe for the broadcasters to be able to edit highlight reels and create more content. So if you take a step back, what we are building is the media infrastructure of sports. And we try to interconnect our different clients platform to each other because at the end of the day everything is interconnected. So when you're working for a club you want to have a direct connection to the league, to the federations, to the brand, et cetera. So uh, yeah, some creating the, the media infrastructure of sports, if that makes sense.

Speaker A: That's great. And now you and Xavier, your co founder, you previously worked together developing software for fiveside football sites.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: What prompted the move to sort of sports media as your, as your next company?

Speaker C: I uh, would say two things. So when we. So yeah we worked on, on this 5 sight, I mean like more generally like amateur sports recording system. So what we're doing, we're putting CCTV cameras recording amateur sports games and then having A.I. uh, like creating highlights and sending it back to the players. And so we sold that to the biggest network of five A site football centers in the US So five were like very successful now highly recommend everyone to check them out. They are pretty intense cities.

Speaker B: Working with city football group.

Speaker C: Yeah. And so after that we're like okay, that was a cool project. We love building product together but how can we do that? And can we reuse some of the knowledge we created in terms of like media content and you know, media production and media management, but apply it on a much bigger market. And so when we looked at like the content world, sports is obviously like the most valuable content out there. And the thing that was very interesting for us was to see that fan consumption was evolving a lot. So as we discussed like many different platforms. And so we're like how are those rights, sports rights holders adapting to this consumption shift? And so we went to visit them and that's what we did. We discovered all this chaos and everyone in the industry that I've been working uh, uh, on content knows how chaotic it is. So we explored that firsthand. It was like at the time it was with Toulouse in France, they were just acquired by Redbirds. They were in Second division, they had a bit of time to spend with us looking at their processes and we're like, oh, that could be interesting if we are able to centralize all of that in uh, one platform. Because at the end of the day it's the IP of the, of the right holder. So um, that, that can have a lot of value. And then like little by little worked with League, so on more broadcast workflows and we kind of like merge those two world, like the broadcast world where you know nothing can fail, very real time. And the digital world where it's like more about flexibility, distribution, reach and trying to merge those two all together and

Speaker B: talk us through the development of the products. Then what was the kind of initial core functionality where you were doing pilots with Toulouse or others? And how has that evolved over time, over the last couple of years?

Speaker C: Yeah, so at the time it was super easy and we got lucky because I think AWS released their recognition model like to do facial detection close to the time we launched CarPlay. And so what we did, because that was like the first pain point that Toulouse gave, like the tools photographer was giving us, that was to say, so when I'm going to the game I will shoot like I don't know, 2000 photos. Then I will select the 301 that are really good, like do a quick edit, it's already midnight. Then I will like tag them all. Uh, it's, it's 3:00am and during that time I like all the players and their agent like texting me saying like I want photos for my social media channels and stuff. And so we said okay, maybe we can do a super simple thing which is like upload 300 photos, AI in one minute can detect the players and we'll have a mobile app to send them the content. So that was like the V1, the platform that we had in one month. And then they were happy so they connected us to other teams and then we said, okay, let's meet those clients every two weeks, ask them for new workflows. And so the workflow after was the partnership team saying like uh, oh, it's a nightmare to send content to the partners. And that's actually your ROI because they need to prove that the logo is appearing on the LED or they want to activate the partnerships with nice contents. So we added like partner detection. And then it was like the media team saying like, oh, we have a bunch of footage like in the server below the, below the stadium, but we can't edit it where we are on the road. So either a way to access those contents in the cloud. And so we create like this hybrid model where all your full res for like media, uh, is on your server, but you access the proxies in the cloud. And then it was the broadcast team saying like, oh, it's a nightmare to edit a live footage because we need to wait for the end of the broadcast to start doing the clipping. And it's basically how we build the platform. It was just by getting some customer feedback, spending time with them on the ground. And it's always great to be able to be with a photographer or a videographer, uh, watching a game from the sidelines. So that has been pretty, pretty fun to build a product with Stein.

Speaker B: And on that piece about sharing content with athletes and their agents, that can often be quite a personal connection between the club's photographer and the athlete. And you know, we've talked to people where uh, they have that relationship and they want to share those pictures directly themselves and on WhatsApp and almost you know, maybe a resistance towards using a tech product to do that. And then at the same time you've got the football department who want athletes to be focused on playing the game and not on socials and other bits and pieces. How did you kind of push back those two hurdles and say to the photographers, actually we're going to help strengthen your relationship. And then, you know, also dealing with football departments saying no, no, no, like we're not putting an additional ask on the athletes. We're actually helping them and helping you build your relationship with them.

Speaker C: Yeah. So I will start by the second question. I think honestly it might have been the case like yeah, uh, four or five years ago now like all those teams, those league, they understand that, you know, the best advocates are their athletes and if they are not sending content to them, they are missing out on like a, uh, crazy rich that they could have for them, for their brand, but also for their partners. Um, so, and it's much better than the athletes are actually resharing content with like uh, uh, the partners logos of the, of the club, like appearing then like you know, behind the scene that they will capture themselves. So I mean even though like both are important, so I think on that like mentalities have evolved and there is not much to do to convince like everyone that sharing content to the athletes actually creates brand value for the team, for the league. So, so it's a uh, it's a win, win. On the second question, I would say yes, that happens. That's you know, the communication person or the photographer Wants to keep this relationship not that often because again, being harassed with messages to give access to content, uh, um, is painful. But the fact that we are working so closely to them on every other aspect of their workflows, creating this kind of trust where they are like, yeah, at the end of the day that's true, that it's better for me to be able to focus on the creative and potentially creating a better relationship with them by doing a, uh, photo shoot for that or having them more easily participate into activations and stuff because they see the result more quickly. So at the end of the day, the trust that we have created with all those people makes it easy. And some people are asking us, but are athletes downloading the app and stuff? And I'm like, yeah, of course they are. They want to see the content as soon as possible. Uh, there is no question on that. And also another thing that we do is like we can integrate with other apps that are already available. So for us, like it's, it's just like, how can you make sure that as real time as possible, like the content is, is getting in the hands of the people that needs access to it? So that can be athletes, that can be bread, that can be broadcasters, like whoever on the platform that they want to use. So that can be our app, that can be a third party software. Any software they want to use.

Speaker A: Yeah, got it. And how have you noticed your clients needs evolving over the last few years that you've worked with them? I'm thinking in terms of things like the rise of vertical video and how have you built out your product in order to meet those needs.

Speaker C: So I would say that again, there is so much pressure to produce content that there is like a real good understanding of the importance of repurposing your existing content and like optimizing your current production to adapt it to different channels and understanding that the content is performing way better when you're adapting it to the different channels that you're distributing it to. And so I would say there is like a real demand now that didn't exist when we started for rationalization of the processes. And like the. Because production costs so much that you need to be efficient and smart in how you're producing and like trying to see how what you are producing will be repurposed for many different use cases. So, um, that's the biggest trend that we see. And that has two impacts. On the one hand, like, they want to have everything centralized. Like they are complaining about like everything being fragmented and they want to be able to reuse what the social teams have been doing for broadcast. So I don't know what we're working with the French League 1, they want to be able to like all the vertical content they are producing, potentially giving it back to Dazn or like their broadcaster to reuse it in the program feed. And on the opposite they want to be able for social to super quickly like clip contents or using automatic highlights production software, like having access to the vertical version of the program feed for the social and dubbing is also a very interesting topic because like you can get to fans worldwide in their language like almost as real time as possible. Uh, in this round, for instance, like Matti, like the CEO of 11 Labs invested because he was like wow, if sports is the most valuable content and we're able to through scraple, like adapt and through the 11 labs API, like adapt this content to like very different use cases and culture that that makes like your content way more valuable almost like with no effort and no cost. And I think this is one of the biggest challenges for all those teams and leagues. It's how can we produce more with like the same level of quality but for like a uh, less expensive uh, production cost.

Speaker B: You touched on 11 labs there and I'm curious, you know the content ecosystem for sports is so many different companies doing different bits and pieces. How as you've built the products out, uh, have you decided whether to, that's something you're going to build, whether you're going to work with an aws, whether you're going to work with another kind of smaller tech supplier. How have you kind of approached that process of kind of build it yourselves or collaborate?

Speaker C: Yeah. So on that, since day one we have been very clear like we are what we like to call ourselves, a workflow company. So um, we arrive in a club, in a league, in a broadcaster, as like small consultants and uh, we're like okay, let's first put everyone in the same room or do focus groups but make sure that we speak to everyone in the organization, understand the current infrastructure, understand the pain points, understand the business goals, like what are you trying to achieve? And then we say okay, we can keep that because it's working well. Let's not break what's working well. We can centralize that better or because you want to have a more cohesive media infrastructure. And then for all the AI related stuff, we really want to reuse the best softwares and the best API and the best models, uh, depending on what they, what they mean. So we, we have like Very different models for facial recognition, for brain logo detection, for speech to text, for dubbing. And it's always adapted to one, the budget because some are more expensive than some others. And second the use cases. But most importantly, and that's what we believe as like uh, a tech product builders, everything lies into the user experience. So you need to have like a very powerful model and for AI for instance. But the value will come from how we're going to integrate it in our software and how this software is going to be integrated in the day to day operations of this organization. So for that you need to have a very good customer success team that will spend a lot of time doing training, finding the right champion that will evangelize the organization. But it's always like that. Use the best technology for the backend, create a product that will have the best UX UI to make sure that uh, it's easy, that this technology is easy to use and then make sure that you have a real adoption at the club league broadcaster level. And this is like the loop that we've implemented since the beginning. So in terms of like what we develop ourselves, it's mostly like all the media backend. So all the ingest of contents is developed internally, all the index and like data work is uh, developed internally, all the infrastructure is developed internally. All the AI capabilities are. We take the best on the market because we know that we'll never be the best AI media indexation platform. That's just impossible. So it's better to use the best in class.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a very, very expensive thing to build for sure.

Speaker C: Yeah. And also it can be just more specific. Like at the end of the day data, uh, is a data game. So you want to work with the one that will have the most data. And for now because we're only working in sport, that won't be impossible.

Speaker A: Uh, I mentioned at the beginning that you'd been, I think I used the word hoovering up a lot of clients. What is it that you think when clients are looking at scoreplay? What's the secret sauce you think that people are latching on? Because one of the things that I've noticed when I first looked at scoreplay was the breadth of the product, which is probably both a blessing and a curse because it's harder for people to latch onto a particular thing or what do you think it is that clients are latching onto? And are different clients latching onto different things as well?

Speaker C: First and foremost, existing customer referrals are like customers. Our best advocate and our Best salespeople. And since Toulouse four years ago to you know, now the Brooklyn Nets or like any big league or clients we're working with, we've decided to stay very verticalized in sports for the user experience reason because we believe that, you know, you need to create a product that fits like a particular need. It's such an integrated and like closed industry that people will know very quickly if you are delivering like a good experience and will share it to their peers in the industry. So either it's an accelerator or it's a killer. Uh, for us that's been an accelerator also because we spend a lot of time with our, with those clients making sure that they are really happy with their experience. And since we started we had like, I think virtually no churn, maybe one or two team that's run out of business, but like no direct. Direct churn because you know, we became like so like important. It's, it's like a CRM. Like you don't want to change your CRM all the time. You go through big migration and we dedicate a lot of time like making sure that even those migration are going really well. So I think the main reason is like just customer satisfaction that's uh, create like network effects retention and like a

Speaker A: positive loop and building the idea of the clients and how well they're using it. Can you give us an example of you know, one of your clients who's really leveraging scoreplay to its absolute fullest potential?

Speaker C: Yeah, I would take two or three different quick examples. So when you are a uh, team like let's take the Brooklyn Nets, like or you know, angelsi. Let's take angelsea because it's a smaller team so it's even more like impactful for them. They used to have like five different tools. One for broadcast ingest because they are ingesting like their live feeds and their like stadium big screen feed, like all of that. So this we are doing it for them and they are able to clip in virtualized content, like do all the editing in software. Uh, and at the same time the BD team can keep a growing MXF so broadcast quality directly in Adobe Premiere. Then like the photographer that we're using another tool just for photo is able to upload in the same tool than the broadcast people, which is like insane for them. Then like the social team can use the mobile app to create contents on the pitch and upload to the same tool where the broadcast and the photo are getting uh, located. Um, and then the marketing are creating graphics directly for this particular game in the same tool than the others. And so you end up having like one platform where you have like every single pieces of content that have been created for this particular game located on that. And what's powerful after is that obviously this is then getting delivered to the right people. But it's also available in the API so they can do integration with their websites, with their app. Like all the workflow are getting centralized into one platform that is kind of the beating hertz of the, of the organization. And if you take big uh, federations like uh, Caf, uf, concaf, we're all working with all of them. So that was like the team level. When you do it at the federation level or FIBA who have invested in the rounds, it's much more impressive because all those little bitting hurts for those teams. Those federations are coming up to the federation that can give access to the broadcasters, that can give access to all the other people in the ecosystem. And so you end up having all the sports contents getting tagged the same way from one organization to another and getting centralized up to the top so that this content can be licensed and reutilized by like uh, all the right holders. And so the content has much more value because it's, it's real time, it's well indexed and it can be automated like the push can be automated on very different platforms that just to give you an example of like how the bottom up strategy works because if you're really good at the bottom, then at the top they will have everything perfectly clean and they can sell web better, license web better the content of the sports.

Speaker A: And how are you finding that your clients are measuring the impact? Is it a cost saving? Is it a productivity of their, of their people? Is it uh, more renewals with sponsors because they're able to share better with them? How are you finding that people are kind of quantifying what you're doing?

Speaker C: So I would say three big buckets. One can be actually not cost saving if we're able to use existing budget that they had for some existing tool that we can replaced. Like that's obviously cost saving but not only on the license, also on the storage. Because when you think about it, the more tool you add, the more like you're duplicating your storage, your transcoding of content, like all of that. So that's one big aspect of it also in terms of like scalability. Like because if you take like all our big NBA NFL customers, they have like petabytes of contents. So if you're able to optimize this. That means that you need to buy less server on site that you can choose the cloud that you want to use. And so you make like a uh, cost savings on the, on the storage then obviously, which is what the main reason why they are working with us is improving the value of the contents by increasing the reach. And the reach is for their own channels, but also for their third party channels. And the third big aspect is improving the product because at the end of the day all those companies are like media companies that are selling contents. And so how you are packaging the content that you're selling is very important because the experience that you are providing to your broadcasters, your media partners, your brands, it's not only like the raw assets and making sure that they have access to the raw assets, it's also how are you delivering those raw assets and how are you creating like actual value on top of it. Like we're working with uh, a Grand Slam tennis tournament that's they are reselling like couple hundred thousand euros per year to every broadcaster. Like the access to the platform were for two reasons, because there is like all the footage, but also because they are able to use the Adobe panel like to create content and we're actually like they're actually providing tools to their broadcaster, media partners, et cetera. So it's those three aspects. It's saving costs for producing content and storing it, increasing your reach and improving the product that you're selling to your. Right. Right buyers.

Speaker B: Yeah. I think that piece around monetizing the content and content archive is something we've certainly seen as a trend over the last year or two and there's, you know, I've lost count of how many rights holders are in the process of digitalizing what they have and trying to find a system so that stuff's more searchable and so that they can share it with partners and grant access to some files and others. And it's definitely something where you talk through with people and it's just ripe for disruption from a, a tech perspective.

Speaker C: And it's, it's crazy like ah, for a caf, like for the African Football Confederation, we, we went through a big process of like digitalizing the, the content because we're still on tapes and you know that that's again those kind of things takes a bit of time and that's why our orchestra like us because we, you know, we don't even like sometimes we, we try to optimize like to do it at cost because we know that we are building their infrastructure for the next 10 years. So we can invest a bit on, on that first phase. But yeah like you have so much to do on that. Obviously a lot of the content has already been digitalized but you still have a lot of very old fashioned way of storing the content and making it accessible to the cloud is super important because a lot of those people are waiting sometimes 24 hours to download the files that is on a very deep archive somewhere under the stadium.

Speaker A: And you mentioned before about how a number of the clients were using it with their brand partners as well. Can you give us sort of a use case of what that would look like and how a rights holder would be sharing the content with their brand partners?

Speaker C: Yeah, so, so on that's it's, it's, it's actually pretty simple. So two steps. First steps, every piece of content that is getting a play on the platform go through AI we detect the logos of the different partners that we can, we can see then like feedback is a good example of that. They can create portal for the different partners. Or LFP like the French League 1 had done something very cool for that where you create uh, an environment like very well branded to your, like not to scoreplay but to, to the actual right holder where they have two ways or three ways of sharing content. One is like automatic. For instance if it's a photo and the logo has been detected and it's a game like you, you can have like very advanced rules for that share the content to them. Second is semi automatic. So we have like someone looking at the footage for a particular game and say oh yeah, I want you to send that to them. But usually what they are doing is like they are uh sending a we transfer link or like and that's, that's the truth, that's how it's happening. But here you can like have again a branded platform where it's not only like Dizzy and Condemn but uh, you have like the, the like all the like the archive of everything that had been always shared to the partners. And third it's for partners that you are not always working on. So LPGA for instance we're building with them a platform where they can actually license some of the, of the footage. So they created like their archive on a platform. And you can like, let's say you're a content creator and you want a piece of archive or something from the last tournament. You can clip exactly what you want, explain the usage and then like there is a back and forth for either validating the access like invoicing for the footage. So three, three steps. Either it's like for like key partners, like auto delivery as real time as possible. Second is like uh, manual delivery but uh, in a platform that aggregates everything that has been delivered. So that's you keep track of everything. Third, like uh, self serve marketplace style where you can actually get access to and license some of the content.

Speaker A: And how have you approached your go to market strategy? Because obviously you're serving a lot of clients now in a lot of different countries and a lot of different sports. Which countries did you prioritize and which sports did you prioritize?

Speaker C: Um, yeah, so two things on that. The first one is yeah, very early and it was not an easy choice. We said like let's focus on sports that you know, in a step two we want to go to the entire life industry. But first like let's build the product for the most valuable industry. Which is, which is sports. That was like the first big good market decision. Second we said like, you know, we were a team of five. So let's start by. With soccer. No, with football. Sorry. Let's again create a lot of trust, create a lot of referrals in this industry. And so little by little we started working with more and more teams. Now we have like, I don't know, like 70, 80 clubs, 10 different leagues like the MLS, the NWSL, FP, like quite a lot of them all the Flourish, Caf Concaf, Uefi and stuff. When that was done, we said, okay, we're ready to adapt it to different sports. And the beauty of our model is that by essence, it's not sport specific. Uh, every sport is the same. It's content, data and a list of athletes and partners. And actually for the live industry it's not so different. But we'll come back on that. And so we adapted to other sports. So the international version of skiing. I was one of the early ones who adapted FIBA for basketball. And then we reused that to go to the US like the US will become our biggest market down the line because it's the biggest sports market. But we entered through soccer. Same. That's, that's how you can say it. And then at, at first like USL team, then nwsl, then mls. M like always proving ourselves, uh, and then with aptitude. We had like good experience with basketball. So we, we did NBA, NBA teams. Now we have like six or seven and five more in pilots and, and in the U.S. what was great too is we could do a lot of emerging sports. So we started working with all the Pickleball leagues with Ligue 1 volleyball, because we had like volleyball World clients and they were impressed by what we're doing. Athlete Unlimited, like all those emerging leagues that had no media infrastructure where we could start from uh, a uh, blank canva. So that was great. But you know, at the end of the day I would say it's capitalizing on our existing clients to get to the next one. It's always how we thought about it. And that's also how we're planning to extend to like broadcasters and the live industry in general. Because now that we're working with so many big tournaments, leagues, et cetera, we get access to those broadcaster, we get access to other people that are doing live shows for other industries and that can for the future be an interesting model. But for the next two years really focus on sports, making sure that again we're building this media infrastructure for sports because a lot of the value is coming from the network that we're creating. And so we want to capitalize on that.

Speaker B: And in terms of that network, I've kind of listened to what you've said as your clients being people who are photographers or media managers or uh, in digital roles. But athletes must make up a big part of that. And you've obviously got some, you know, big, big name athletes as investors in the companies. How have you leveraged your athlete usership of the platform to help grow the business?

Speaker C: No, that's, that's a very good point because you know something I haven't mentioned on the go to market strategy that when we started we had. So we're coming from the five aside world and that doesn't help you get to speak to professional sports teams at least. And so you know, everything was super slow in terms of like getting access, like our foot in the door in those organizations. Uh, and one thing like one of our early investors knew Mario Godzilla and said like you should, we had a convo with him and it was like, yeah, I mean this is an obvious thing at the end height I'm receiving and in all my previous teams I'm receiving like Dropbox things and things like that. So uh, it's definitely a pain point. And if you really have like issue with the uh, network, like I mean I know everyone obviously in Germany and in other teams, I can help with that. And we're like, oh actually athletes are perfect investors for us because one, they understand the pain points, second they want to invest more and more in tech. And third, you know, anyone will answer to Mario Goods and he's actually like Sometimes sending messages for us on LinkedIn. That has been amazing for us. So he introduced us to Kevin Durant's VC ARM Certified V when I arrived in the US and that's how we got the Brooklyn Nets because he was playing there at the time. And so we're like, okay, how can we replicate this? And also because the company was going really well. So athletes, investor that's investing in our previous round were speaking to each other and said like it's actually a good investment. And so we managed like little by little to create this roster. Like in these last rounds we had like Alex Morgan used it at San Diego at the time, so she was a user. And so when we had a call she was like, yeah, I really enjoyed using it. I have like so many feedbacks for you. So you know that was uh, really useful like and you know, it's just like every athletes are different. Some wants to be hands on, some wants just to invest and like create a VCR on top. So you have to adapt to their philosophy. But yeah, we've been, you know, really lucky so far. You know, for instance, I met Pat Cumming in Australia with the captain of the cricket team and he was like, you know Matt, whenever you're ready, I want to help you enter the cricket space. And so this is like in our plan to properly open app and have a team there. But since we really want to do things properly it will take a bit of time. But what a better ambassador for us than working with him. But not on a marketing point of view. I mean sometimes they are doing like Nico Roseberg did a super nice video for us, but it wasn't unsociated. But it's more like how can we work together, create a good relationship and use your network to grow as a

Speaker A: company and just building on the fundraising elements as well. You obviously got an amazing roster of athletes but you've got a very impressive roster of venture capital funds and also quite a diverse group of venture capital funds as well, which I think is really quite interesting. From Harry Stebbings 20 VC through Alexis Ohanian's 776. And then you've got, you know, the, the guys that we know very well over at Apex. Um, how did you approach building that sort of investment group?

Speaker C: Yeah, so that's, that's a very good question. So when we started our dream never had been to create a VC backed company. Like our dream is to create like the biggest like software company to spend as much time as possible like building a great product and selling it, um. And so we first worked with a lot of business angels and a lot of like former entrepreneurs. Like I think our second investor was Nico Julia from Sawrayer. And you know, working with him, like he went through the exact same pain of like, I'm not coming from the industry and I need to get like all those rights. How can I can I do it? So as we're selling software, him is buying rights. So it's a bit different, but helped us like massively in terms of like understanding how you're building a company or you're building, building your go to market strategy and stuff. And so then we replicated and we're like a lot of different entrepreneurs, like uh, um, the CTO of Even Brights for instance, whether a great one. That's helped a lot Xav on you know, key decision for product, product building. And so after that we're like, okay, we are. We have like very good metrics and we could accelerate if we had a bit of, a bit more of funding. And I was opening the US so I was like something very important in the US is going to be to have like US investors and particular US vc. And at the time we just started working with Android City and I knew that Alexis knew the project because. And that's a true story. He put like a demo request on our website a year before we raised the seed round with them because he was like, he's a product person, so he was really looking at what Angel City could use in terms of tooling. And he was like shocked by the tool that they were using. And so he was like, yeah, I heard about this company's core play through Nico Julia actually, who has invested because he was an investor and Sawyer, um, and so when he saw the impact that we had in Joel City, he was like, okay guys, I can help you massively, both in terms of building a good tech company and also with networking in sports. So that's what's kind of an abuse fit in terms of him leading the seed round. And after that we've always chatted with VC just to understand how they were seeing, seeing the markets helping us like challenging our like growth strategy. And again, we had like very good metrics last year were cash flow positive and a lot of VCs like starting getting interested because like that's what they were looking for at that time in the, in the market. So we started receiving like quite a few term sheets for a Series A. And then Harry stabbings like from 20 VC arrived and said like he missed the C like just after, it was just uh, Europe just after a few weeks after Alexis let it. So it was like this time I really want to make it happen. And he made the intro to Nico Rosberg, um, to Pat. We spoke about and really showed he would be hands on. But at the same time he's also a top tier one tech investor and for us that's the most important. Our lead investors have to be tech mining people and then our strategic investors have to understand the world of entertainment and sports really well. And that's always how we like optimizing for, for capital Race. But we have been lucky because we have been pretty capital efficient. We're always in the position of deciding who wanted to work with on this project. And I'm feeling super grateful for that because I know it's not always the case.

Speaker A: I mean a $13 million Series A, that's a pretty healthy amount of money, right? What do you think that funding uh, is really going to enable you to go and do now where's, how are you going to use it to be

Speaker C: transparent again with the metric that we had and stuff, we could have raised more but we wanted also this to be less dilutive and we already created this plan for saying okay, this is what we need for investing exactly what we want in the product. Have a big runaway. Um, so that was the reasoning. So it's going to be mostly product investments and there is so much happening on the AI side of things that's, you know, we know that we want to integrate a lot of things. We want to improve like our API a lot because, because we want to be this media infrastructure. We want a lot of people to integrate on top of it and work with like all the other companies on the marketplace like building a much more integrated ecosystem. Because I think this is the main problem of port right now. It's just too fragmented and obviously we need to be able to keep delivering the same level of value for our current standard customers to like 500 customers in the uh, in, in two or three years. Because the value of what we do is not only like the technology is, is also like the service that goes with it and like all the customer success work that we're doing with those customers also because we're able then to upsell them with new features. So it's. Yeah, I mean I, I love doing that. That's, that's not interested what I'm doing like spending with time with customers but that's also has a very good ROI because we're able to then provide Them with new feature and like upsell, upsell them. So I think the three main reason why we did it was to improve the product always. First because you have to create the best product on your category. That's must have. Second, open ourselves for optionality if uh, we have very good opportunity again outside of sports in the lab industry, being able to do it not in the next 12, 18 months but in the future. Also show big customer that we are not this small Portuguese startup that we were at the time and that you can trust us in building your media infrastructure for like 10 next years and we're here to stay. So that was important from the perspective and yeah investing in the team and making sure that we can keep delivering the same level of service.

Speaker A: I think that point that you made there about clients being able to trust you because you have a certain level of stature and m backing that they know that you're going to be there in 6 12, 18 months I think is actually a really important one. And I think it's often underlooked by a lot of organizations.

Speaker C: No 100% like you know, when you start entering millions dollars RSPs you also are signing like big SLAs. In particular when you're like closer to the broadcast world where again things can't break. You need to be able to deliver those live feeds to the broadcasters like without any interruption and stuff. And like every minute you are not delivering like you're paying a lot of money and so just being able to sign those contracts, you need to have like capital to, to, to show that they, they can sign that with you and you, you, you can ensure them that you're going to pay if there is any problem.

Speaker A: Um, you've obviously been on a heck of a journey uh, going back to the first client to lose. But if you look back, what's the thing that you kind of wish that you'd know now or indeed what's the thing that you made a mistake on and you learned most from that as an if you were to do it again that you'd do differently.

Speaker C: I would say again focus is the most important things and I think even if we have been pretty good at it, staying in sports, building the product for this industry and stuff, you always tend to extend your market as quickly as possible and go for other opportunities. Um, and sometimes we did some tests when there was the NFT craze where you're like oh yeah, let's create NFTs and stuff. And that was such a defocus that didn't bring Anything to the product at the time, we're not solving a real need. And so I would say this is the main thing. It's how can you obviously be open minded, grow for. Because our goal at the end of the day is to build a billion dollar company. Like you are not VC backed if you don't have a, uh, big ambition. But always stay as focused as possible and always take decision rationally depending on the customer needs. And I would say, yeah, sometimes we're like uh, taking some exit that was not useful and had to come back on the highway, losing a bit of time. So yeah, that would be my main thing. The first deck of Scorplayer was already centralizing indexation and distribution of content like the very first one, even before we had a product. And I think it has to stay the case for the next five years. And even if you have revenue opportunities that are super appealing, you always have to think in like the grand scheme of things and that's something that is important to repeat yourself and that I think we know we've been fine, but we could have been even better.

Speaker A: And last question then to wrap up, but who's your dream client that you'd like to sign, that you'd love to sign this year?

Speaker C: We're speaking about that before the start of the recording. So I'm a big PSG fan because I've been raised in Paris. I still have my season tickets and I'm trying to come back to games as often as possible. And I think what we're working now is 16 club out of 18 in French Ligue 1. Um, but we're lacking PSG and they are using the platform with the league because we're working with the league and with UEFA. So you know, I'm not dispiriting like uh, this is one of my priority, personal priority, not for the company but for myself.

Speaker A: That's brilliant. You've always got to make sure that you got your own club using the platform. So I think that's a, that's a pretty good one. And uh, so on. We're going to wrap it up. So, uh, Victorian, thank you so much for joining us on the uh, on the podcast day. That has been a phenomenal insight into what is a very, very fast growing business. And it's been absolutely great to hear your story.

Speaker C: No, thank you so much for the invites. Always great to share it and I'm always, you know, telling people we are building this to solve real life challenges that uh, the sports industry has. So if anyone listening to that and having ideas on how a content management platform could make their life easier. Please shoot me an email, shoot me a LinkedIn message and would be happy to hear it and add that in the product.

Speaker A: There we go. There's a challenge for all the listeners that are out there. And Andy, thank you as ever for joining us today.

Speaker B: My pleasure. Yeah, thanks again, Victorian. A lot of insights from this and, uh, excited to hear about just how rapidly you've done what you've done and excited to see what 2025 holds for you as well.

Speaker C: Thank you so much, guys.

Speaker A: And that's great. So the last thank you goes to all our, uh, listeners. So I, uh, hope you enjoyed that. Please do check us out, uh, the website at Sportsloft co and check us out on LinkedIn as well. And, uh, we'll be putting some video clips of Victorian up on LinkedIn and sharing that as well over the next coming days. And thank you for joining us in the Sportsloft. Goodbye.