Anvara Raises $3.1M Seed Round to Make Sports Sponsorship a One-Click Purchase

Anvara, an online marketplace for sports and live event sponsorship assets, has closed a $3.1 million seed round. Investors include Game Changer Ventures, the fund of prominent angel investor Roger Ehrenberg; Marquee Ventures; Bryan Rosenblatt, former partner at Craft Ventures; and Jamie Robinson, founder of Tapptek, a SaaS platform for the alcohol industry. A coalition of multiple athletes also participated in the round.

Following the funding announcement, investor Roger Ehrenberg wrote on LinkedIn: "The sponsorship industry needs to catch up with programmatic advertising. The current manual matching model that dominates the industry is no longer necessary.

Just as I believed back in 2009 that most ad buying would eventually shift to quantitative trading models, I now believe Anvara will accelerate the monetization of brand sponsorships."

Anvara is headquartered in New York. According to its website, event organizers or teams can list opportunities on Anvara, while brands and agencies can directly "shop" for rights and place orders.

Anvara's co-founders, Nick Khalili and Andrei Stenmark, are both University of Southern California (USC) alumni with backgrounds in finance.

Co-founder Andrei Stenmark said the platform has "nearly $1 billion in sponsorship assets listed" and that the funding will be used to "hire software engineers, data scientists, and senior partnership talent."

| Information and image sources: Official press release; LinkedIn