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Arctos Sports Partners

4550 Travis Street, Suite 300, Dallas, TX, 75205, United States

Overview

Arctos Sports Partners works with innovative and visionary ownership groups and leagues across North American professional sports and European soccer. With offices in Dallas and New York, Arctos is led by its six-person partner group—which includes co-founders Ian Charles, David “Doc” O’Connor, Joseph Nasr and Jordan Solomon—and has a team of more than 25 investment and operational professionals. In addition to liquidity solutions and growth capital, Arctos’ portfolio franchises are able to leverage the deep industry knowledge and operational expertise of the firm’s 17 senior advisors, including Theo Epstein, to help drive additional value. To date, Arctos has invested in more than a dozen sports franchises, and is poised to capitalize on expanding investment opportunities.

Total investments
2
Lead investments
0
Investments · 12mo
0
Active investors
6

Sector focus

  • Finance
  • Financial Services
  • Venture Capital
Visit website

Investment portfolio

  • SeatGeek

    Participated · Series E · Aug 2022

    SeatGeek is a ticketing platform that operates a consumer SeatGeek Marketplace and provides end-to-end ticketing software for sports teams and venues. Its product suite includes Rally, a personalized in-app experience; SeatGeek Swaps, a ticket return feature; and the SeatGeek Marketplace for fans to buy and sell tickets. The company works with roughly 200 partners, including the Arizona Cardinals, Dallas Cowboys, and the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets. SeatGeek reported it is on target to double revenue this year and posted $186.3 million in net revenue in 2021. The company recently named former Tumblr and NYT executive Brian Murphy as CTO. SeatGeek plans to use the funds from its Series E to continue investing in its products, customers, and partners. SeatGeek is a mobile-focused ticketing platform that offers a modern ticketing solution called SeatGeek Open, which enables artists and teams to sell tickets directly within other apps and websites. The company used proceeds from a Series D to acquire TopTix, an Israeli ticketing software company, to add technology and engineering capacity to support SeatGeek Open. TopTix brings a ticketing, fundraising and CRM platform that has been provided to more than 500 institutions processing 80 million tickets a year across 16 countries. TopTix’s clients include museums, theaters, festivals and sports teams such as the Royal Dutch Football Association, Ravinia Festival and multiple English soccer clubs. TopTix will operate as a subsidiary and its co‑founder Eli Dagan will continue to lead the core engineering team in Israel. With the acquisition and integration of TopTix’s teams, SeatGeek now has more than 250 employees across nine offices in six countries. SeatGeek is a mobile-first online ticket sales platform that aggregates tickets for sports and music events and competes directly with StubHub. Launched in 2009, its mobile apps have been downloaded over 3 million times and over 60 percent of users access the service via mobile devices. The company has partnerships with Spotify, Rdio and Last.fm and focuses on surfacing relevant, available ticket recommendations. SeatGeek has doubled its team over the last year to 64 employees and plans to grow to 110 employees by the end of 2015. The startup will use new funding primarily for marketing and to hire additional engineers to improve the mobile experience. To date the company has raised $103 million in total funding. SeatGeek operates a ticket search engine that lets users search for tickets across resale marketplaces like StubHub. The company launched at TechCrunch50 in 2009 and has grown significant mobile usage—its iPhone app (launched end of 2012) accounts for roughly 70% of visits and 45% of transactions. SeatGeek expects to drive about $13 million in ticket sales this month and more than $160 million in sales for the year. The Series B is intended to accelerate mobile product development (improving Android parity and mobile ticket delivery) and to scale marketing and user acquisition roughly 10x. Management says sales are split roughly 60/40 between sports and music, while product efforts are evenly divided to support discovery and broaden event audiences. SeatGeek is an NYC-based ticket search engine led by Jack Groetzinger and Russ D’Souza. The company leverages patent-pending technology to forecast secondary-market ticket prices, helping buyers decide whether to buy immediately or wait and helping sellers time listings. It raised $2.2M in funding and used the proceeds to acquire ticketing competitor Fansnap from Wize Commerce. Backers on the round included existing investors. The article references prior financings, including a $1M Series A in July 2010 and an investment from A-Grade in February 2011. The acquisition of Fansnap indicates SeatGeek is expanding its presence in the secondary ticketing market.

  • Jackpot

    Participated · Series A · Jun 2022

    Jackpot.com is an independent lottery courier platform that lets customers buy official state lottery tickets and, in select markets, scratch-off tickets through its web and mobile interfaces. The company currently serves seven U.S. states—Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio—positioning itself as a convenient alternative to in-store ticket purchases. Its core product streamlines ticket ordering, processing, and prize collection while complying with individual state regulations. Management is now focused on deepening penetration in existing jurisdictions and expanding into additional states as regulatory landscapes allow. To fuel that growth, Jackpot.com secured new financing that improves liquidity and supports an acquisition-heavy customer growth strategy. Leadership emphasized the importance of flexible capital to handle demand spikes that occur around billion-dollar jackpots. Although specific revenue or user figures were not disclosed, investors highlighted the company’s role in modernizing a century-old lottery industry.

Team

  • Peter Valhouli-Farb

    Director & Co-Founder

    LinkedIn
  • Ian H Charles

    Co-Managing Partner, Founder

    LinkedIn
  • David O'Connor

    Managing Partner and Co-Founder

    LinkedIn
  • Deep Patel

    Software Engineer

    LinkedIn