FANtium, an NFT-based athlete investment platform, has announced that it has raised $2M in a private pre-seed investment round. Participants of the tour include leading web3 business angels, including Sandbox COO and Co-Founder Sebastien Borget, Sorare’s growth leader Brian O’Hagan, Argent Co-Founder and Dec CEO Itamar Lesuisse and Spatial Co-Founder Anand Agarawala. In addition, the company receives support from well-known sports personalities and entrepreneurs, including US Open Champion Australian tennis player Dominic Thiem and OneFootball founder Lucas von Cranach.
FANtium will democratize the financing of athletes and allow fans to invest in athletes. Fans will be able to invest in the career earnings of future bright young talents. Investor fans will have the right to receive a share of the athlete’s real earnings from prize money and sponsorship agreements.
Professional athletes can convert a certain amount of the next season’s earnings into tokens and sell these tokens as NFTs to their fans through FANtium’s platform.
Young talents will be able to tokenize a portion of their future earnings to raise the funds they need to get to the top. This ability solves a big problem that many young athletes face in different sports: They have talent but don’t have access to money to become entirely professional. In particular, individual sports such as tennis, golf or racing are very costly for people at a young age and require a significant amount of money for travel, coaching and equipment. Regarding this issue, Jonathan Ludwing, CEO of FANtium, said:
“If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense that only companies have access to money. There are billions of athletes and sports enthusiasts in the world who would love to invest in these and become part of their journey, these talents by connecting with sports enthusiasts, we are making the sport more equal because as young athletes, will no longer depend on your success, and your financial background.” Jonathan Ludwig, Co-founder and CEO of FANtium
Like Royal, where song rights are sold as NFTs, FANtium uses NFT technology to enable fans to invest in athletes and share in their earnings. The company aims to create a new asset class, ‘athlete investments’, and then expand into other sports categories.
FANtium was founded by a team of sports and web3 enthusiasts with extensive experience in building and scaling companies. It is led by Jonathan Ludwig, who has previously launched two startups and invested early in multiple successful web3 startups such as Sorare.
Leave a comment