Korrio, a platform for taking youth sports online, announced Thursday that it has secured $3.3 million in Series A funding led by Ignition Partners with participation from private investors, including Martin Coles (former COO of Starbucks and CEO of Reebok) and Sam Schmidt (former Indy Racing League driver and owner of Indy Light Series racing team Sam Schmidt Motorsports).John Connors, partner at Ignition and former CFO at Microsoft, will be joining Korrio’s advisory board, along with Coles and Schmidt.
The Korrio platform, called Playflow, just launched earlier this month. Playflow takes the whole system involved in organizing youth sports and puts it all in one place, so players, clubs, coaches, managers, fans and parents are better connected and informed.
There are almost too many features to list but here are some highlights. Players get their own personal profiles, complete with stats, history and a photo gallery. Parents have an easier way to register their children and look up information related to games, like scheduling, directions, weather and carpooling. Fans too can interact with the players by looking up scheduling information and by looking through photo galleries.Clubs, coaches and managers benefit from Korrio by having a better way to register players and teams, communicating with them and putting together schedules for the season.
When they say it’s comprehensive, they mean comprehensive.
“There is a glaring need in the market for a solution like Korrio’s,” argued Connors, “which takes advantage of the efficiencies and scale of the software-as-a-service model and delivers a solution that saves time and money for administrators, coaches, volunteers, and families, allowing everyone to focus on playing the game.”
Connors says 45 million kids play organized youth sports today, four times as much as 20 years ago. And that number is growing. So the audience is clearly there; now Korrio just needs to prove that there’s truly a demand for it.
