leAD Sports and the NFL
leAD Sports and the NFL
With the NFL season getting underway this week, I wanted to highlight a couple of startups in the leAD network innovating the way we watch, interact and bet on the NFL!
TAPPP is the first company to receive investment from the ADvantage Fund. For those of you unfamiliar with leAD, leAD consists of the leAD Sports1 Accelerator, the Business Builder (Seed Stage investment vehicle) and the ADvantage Fund. The ADvantage fund is a joint venture between leAD Sports and OurCrowd as we look to continue to invest in sports-tech companies through Series A and beyond. To read more about ADvantage’s first investment in TAPPP read on here.
TAPPP’s focus is on making access to premium sports content available as a pre-paid service for those leagues. TAPPP is available at over 5,000 retailers, including Walmart and Gamestop.
TAPPP has rolled out a new product this season with the 30-day Game Pass for $30.00 that gives customer’s access to live out-of-market preseason games, condensed replays of every game of the season, access to special footage and camera angles as well as an archive of over 10 years of NFL games.
The ability for archived games to be quickly and easily filtered by the player, down or type of play makes this a great resource for fantasy football fanatics as well as NFL diehards!
Additionally, the first 20,000 customers that purchase their NFL Game Pass at Gamestop will receive an official NFL100 coin, as the league celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. One thing to note is this product is currently only available in the USA.
The new 30-day NFL Game Pass will be a welcome addition to the TAPPP lineup with the Season Long Game Pass already on offer. And with 14,700 Americans cancelling their cable subscriptions daily(that totals 5.3 million a year!), it’s easy to see why the NFL is partnering with companies like TAPPP to continue to provide fans with access to their favourite teams.
FanAxn is an accelerator graduate of leADs that have received follow on funding via the Business Builder this year as they look to create the next generation of real-time fantasy games. FanCoin is their first offering, a free to play predictive fantasy game available on Apple and Android, where users answer a series of questions before the match with the chance to win Fancoins that can be redeemed for prizes.
In line with the NFL launch, FanCoin will be launching its jackpot games where users can make predictions on certain jackpot matches. If you manage enough free correct predictions on jackpot matches in a row you can win prizes as large as $5k for the first rollout of the jackpot game.
Champions Round is the third company from the leAD ecosystem reshaping our experience with the NFL. Champions Round has just joined us in Berlin this year for our third accelerator as they look to launch a Round-based fantasy sports app.
Instead of playing against Data Crunchers in 1-day affairs with 10,000 people or committing to an entire season against a group where half will quit or stop updating their rosters as their team is out of reach of winning, Champions Round breaks the season into 4 rounds with users playing in a pool of 8 to 16 players with their first version launching for the NFL season with free to play leagues.
Carter Russ, the CEO and Founder of Champions Round has gone to great lengths to assemble a team with a ton of experience in both fantasy sports and gaming, making me excited to see just how much more engaging Champions Round will be versus the usual Yahoo league!
Carter hopes to roll out the real money offering of Champions Round next year which will then allow users to set up wagered leagues with friends or select a stake and find a league of 8 to 16 random players looking to play at similar stakes. You can download Champions Round for iOS now!
It’s an exciting time to be an NFL fan as the innovation continues on and off the field.
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