Investment Notes: LIGR

LIGR is an all-in-one sports graphics and broadcast management platform that offers anyone— and any league—the ability to stream TV-quality sports graphics with no need for hardware, designers or developers. They’re levelling the playing field for sub-elite sports and allowing them to connect with fans in a professional manner.

Since our original seed investment in early 2020, the LIGR team has executed phenomenally on its product roadmap, and built a foundation for future growth across sports, countries and user groups. We are extremely excited to be leading LIGR’s pre-Series A round with new investors including Andrew Bogut and MindSpring Capital.

There are three areas which stood out and further cemented our belief in the business as we followed on in our investment.

Inspirational founders that execute

Due diligence on a founding team prior to a seed investment is useful (and essential), but the full picture really comes into focus once you’re invested. That’s when you see the founding teams hustle, grit, resilience and execution skills first hand.

We originally invested in LIGR in January 2020, just as the business had secured contracts with AFL, cricket and soccer state organisations across Australia. That round of funding was to be invested in product development, particularly the launch of LIGR’s self-service platform, and the addition of more sports and themes.

Since then, co-founders Luke McCoy and Adam Burke have hit every product and operational milestone that they set out to against an incredibly challenging macroeconomic backdrop — COVID-19 induced lockdowns meant that many sports were cancelled or postponed. Importantly, LIGR launched LIGR Live in mid 2020, a multi-tier SAAS payment and self serve platform operational in key global markets (US, UK, Europe and Asia).

LIGR has also grown from servicing four sports and a single theme at the time of their last raise to 15 sports and 12 themes currently - new sports include rugby union, rugby league, ice hockey, field hockey, netball and water polo.

A globally diverse customer base, achieved without a sales team

The LIGR system is being used in every corner of the globe; youth rugby teams in the UK and France, second tier soccer teams in Japan and the Women’s Big Bash League on Fox Sports here in Australia.

There are registered users from 120 countries, spread across organisations of every kind, from individual club/teams to high schools and universities, hobby streamers to international sporting organisations. This breadth of amateur to professional groups is a testament to how user-friendly the product is, and the impact it has made at every level of sport.

It’s also demonstrated the strength of the product marketing-led growth strategy. Every spoke of their content marketing wheel including blogs, EDMs, videos and in-game self advertising contributes to this rapidly expanding user base.

A vision for growth that isn't slowing down

Beyond the live streaming product, LIGR is building out a sponsorship network with full reporting, auditing and tracking capabilities for brands and advertisers.

This network will give brands the ability to access local customers through grassroots and sub-elite sports, tracking and measuring their return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) at the same time as giving these clubs a new stream of revenue.

This will give advertisers another channel to connect with audiences. One that is clearly distinct from the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Google. Brands can be hyper-targeted as the sports being played are sub-elite, with more geographically concentrated fan bases. Plus, they’ll be able to understand the effectiveness of their advertising directly through LIGR.

As the world moves on from COVID-19, we see live sport at all levels as an important part of everyday life. LIGR gives clubs at all levels the ability to connect with their fans and the ability to monetise viewership through brand partnerships.

As the team and the business continue demonstrating their incredible capability, we look forward to the next phase of LIGR’s growth.

‍Want to join the LIGR team? Check out their open roles.