Alex Rodriguez's Startup Jump Raises $23 Million In Quest To Be Shopify For Sports Teams

Forbes

3 days ago

Big Swing: Alex Rodriguez cofounded Jump, a startup aiming to modernize the fan experience. With four teams currently clients, its annual revenue is less than $10 million, but that represents a fraction of the opportunity at hand. Michael Prince for Forbes
W hen Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian entered the sports world six years ago, as the founding control owner of the National Women's Soccer League's Angel City FC, he was surprised how resistant to innovative technology the industry remained. It would be relatively simple, for instance, to offer fans the option to upgrade their tickets in the middle of a game or order concessions directly to their seats, but those sorts of features were mostly unavailable—and Ohanian found the explanation for the deficiencies just as frustrating.
'Whenever I ask that question,' recalls Ohanian, who expanded his sports involvement by launching women's track and field series Athlos last year, 'the answer I usually get from traditional industry experts or veterans is some version of 'well, this is the way it's always been done.''
But those norms are starting to change, and Ohanian is betting on one company to help modernize the fan experience.
On Tuesday, Jump, a ticketing platform founded in 2021 by e-commerce billionaire Marc Lore, MLB legend Alex Rodriguez and entrepreneur Jordy Leiser, announced $23 million in Series A funding led by Ohanian's venture firm, Seven Seven Six, with Courtside Ventures, Will Ventures and Forerunner also participating. The round pushes the company's total funding to $58 million and pegs its valuation north of $100 million.
Whereas fans typically have to buy tickets, merchandise and concessions from a slew of vendors, Jump aims to create a one-stop shop for professional sports teams. In addition to removing some common headaches, such as managing usernames and passwords across different services or tracking down updated event information, the streamlined experience eliminates pricey ticketing fees and offers features not necessarily found on existing services, like the option to purchase a large-group package.
'The easiest way to think about us is we do for sports teams what Shopify does for merchants, which is we bring it all together in a unified system,' says Leiser, the company's CEO.
Those services have enticed four professional franchises to date. In January, Jump signed the NWSL's North Carolina Courage and the United Soccer League's North Carolina FC as its first clients, and last month, the company added the NBA and WNBA teams owned by Lore and Rodriguez, Minnesota's Timberwolves and Lynx. Jump operates with a software-as-a-service model, charging teams a licensing fee that varies based on their size while also collecting between 1% and 5% of all transactions they generate on the platform.
Forbes estimates the company's annual revenue is currently less than $10 million, but that represents a fraction of the opportunity at hand. The business lines of professional sports franchises are 'pretty well trod, well known and fairly fixed to some extent,' Ohanian explains, noting the long-term nature of media rights deals and sponsorship arrangements. Game-day revenues, including ticket and concessions sales, aren't always easy to increase, either, with only so many fans able to attend an event. That reality has left franchises searching for creative ways to make more money.
'We have these emerging, ascendant leagues that are growing very quickly—basically catching up for a bunch of lost time where there was no investment in them—and those owners get to look at [their business] from first principles,' Ohanian says. 'These fans are so fired up to support these players, so fired up to support what these teams represent, and it's a winning proposition.'
Leiser, who previously founded Stella Connect, a customer service startup that was acquired by Medallia for approximately $100 million in 2020, started riffing on the fan engagement idea with his cofounders four years ago, after Lore and Rodriguez had made a failed bid to buy the New York Mets in 2020. A discussion around dynamic ticket pricing soon took on a much larger scope about how new technology could improve the business of a professional sports franchise, and when Lore and Rodriguez agreed to buy the Timberwolves and Lynx in 2021 in a three-stage transaction that valued the teams at $1.5 billion, Jump seemed to have the perfect opportunity to develop its product.
The franchise sale took years to complete, however, with outgoing owner Glen Taylor attempting to back out in 2024 while alleging that Lore and Rodriguez had violated the terms of their arrangement. An arbitration panel eventually settled the dispute, and the NBA finally approved the ownership transfer in June. In the meantime, Jump continued to develop its product and added $25 million in funding to its coffers across two raises in 2023.
'Even when Glen pulled the rug out, no one left,' Leiser says. 'It just emboldened us to say, 'Well, we're going to go even bigger now.' And investors, to their credit, they also see the opportunity. It's an obvious value proposition that there's a very underserved population of sports teams that need something like this.'
While Jump is still a few weeks away from deploying its tech with the Timberwolves, the Courage are already seeing returns from the platform. This year, after replacing Ticketmaster and other vendors, the club has slashed costs by six figures and seen increases in the sale of multi-game ticket packages and the number of single-game ticket buyers who return for additional games. Steve Malik, the medical tech entrepreneur who owns the Courage and North Carolina FC, also invested in Jump's latest funding round after his firsthand experience with the product.
For now, the $23 million raise is primarily earmarked toward existing expenses as the company continues to improve its tech and reels in new customers. Jump, like many early-stage startups, is unprofitable and reliant on outside money to cover the cost of its roughly 50 employees and expensive infrastructure, although the company's use of artificial intelligence tools in its software engineering could one day ease the financial burden.
As Jump aims to add to its client roster by the end of 2025, Leiser only expects interest to skyrocket when more people see what the platform can do.
'This category is incredibly ripe, right?' he says. 'There's a huge need for this, but why hasn't anyone succeeded historically? And why has this need been so unmet for so long?
'No one has ever done something big and bold and truly different. Different is not for everyone at the beginning. It takes time. And so that's why, with the Timberwolves and with the Courage, we're going to show people what it's all about.' MORE FROM FORBES Forbes How This Serial Entrepreneur Became A Billionaire From Diapers, Basketball And Now Takeout By Phoebe Liu Forbes Private Equity Firm Velocity Capital Is Investing More Than $100 Million In A European Soccer Agency By Justin Birnbaum Forbes Monarch Collective Expands Fund To $250 Million To Keep Fueling Women's Sports Boom By Justin Birnbaum Forbes The NWSL's Most Valuable Teams 2025 By Brett Knight