For more than five years, Ishveen Anand worked in the sports industry, primarily focused on securing sponsorships for athletes, teams, leagues and events in India and Europe. Anand found it wasn’t always easy for agents and athletes to connect with companies and vice versa. And she knew that results weren’t always what either party had envisioned.

And so, in 2015, Anand struck out on her own and founded OpenSponsorship, a digital platform with one goal: helping make securing sports sponsorships easier and more effective. The company also focused on the United States due to its huge sports market and appetite for athletes as brand ambassadors.

Back then, OpenSponsorship was among the first online marketplace looking to broker sports marketing deals. But now, dozens of competitors have propped up, especially with the NCAA declaring in July that college athletes can make money from their name, image and likeness.

Still, OpenSponsorship is thriving in a competitive landscape and is looking to grow with more of a focus on college athletes. The company is on track to generate between $4.5 million and $5 million of revenue this year, more than double the $2 million of revenue generated last year. Through the end of August, the platform had facilitated nearly 1,000 sponsorship deals this year, with nearly 25% involving a college athlete.

About 460,000 college students participate in varsity sports, and only an estimated 2% of them end up playing professionally, so the college market dwarfs the pro market.

Anand expects the college deals to increase as the NCAA, states and colleges have more uniform regulations surrounding NIL. For now, the rules vary across the country, leading to some athletes, administrators and companies to be hesitant about completing transactions that could impact their eligibility down the road.

“There’s a lot of education that needs to be done,” Anand said. “There’s a lot of murkiness around what can you do, what categories are OK, how does it all work? There’s a bit of confusion there. Anything that creates confusion doesn’t make deal making easy.”

On OpenSponsorship, companies pay a monthly membership fee ranging from $79 to $1,250 to access the platform, where they can post their marketing opportunities and connect with athletes and agents who are interested in completing deals. Athletes and agents, meanwhile, can join the marketplace for free, but OpenSponsorship takes a commission for any deals secured through the platform. The typical commission is between 10% and 20%.

The deals conducted through OpenSponsorship include athletes endorsing products, posting about the brand on social media, placing the product’s logo on their uniform, appearing at events for promotions and more.

More than 10,000 athletes have signed up for the platform, including players in the NBA, NFL and other professional leagues and college sports. At the same time, about 250 or so brands are usually active, searching the athlete database and running campaigns. OpenSponsorship recently struck deals with Walmart
WMT
and FootLocker
FL
.

“Some of these major brands, it takes time to get them,” Anand said. “At the beginning, it was working with smaller companies, a lot more product-only gifting (where athletes would receive products rather than get paid for promotions). Now, we’re seeing those bigger budgets and bigger brands because we have a lot of validation.”

Still, OpenSponsorship usually works with small- to medium-sized companies that are looking to reach athletes with whom they don’t have a pre-existing relationship.

Lauren Cecchi recently signed up for OpenSponsorship to complete marketing deals for Signables, a company she co-founded in 2018 whose main product is a flat leather ball featuring autographs from top European soccer teams, including Liverpool, Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City. Cecchi joined OpenSponsorship to find athletes for a company initiative called Signathon, where people can sign up for a virtual event with top athletes, ask them questions and have them sign their memorabilia.

This summer, Cecchi used OpenSponsorship to ink a deal for a Signathon event with Sebastian Cordova, a famous Mexican soccer player. She also used the platform to complete a deal with Jack Harrison, a soccer player with Leeds United who is hosting a Signathon next month. In addition, she has connected via OpenSponsorship with about 30 college athletes who autographed balls and other memorabilia that will be sold on the Signathon website.

“OpenSponsorship makes it so easy,” Cecchi said. “As an entrepreneur, I don’t really have a lot of time to become an agent for my brand. We’re doing so many other things. It’s hard to penetrate the sports world, but everyone has a really great relationship with Ishveen. They trust her, they trust OpenSponsorship and they know they can come to the platform and make deals.”

OpenSponsorship, which has 14 employees, has raised $1.3 million of funding through the years from investors that include former NBA player Baron Davis; the Oxford Angel Fund, a group of angel investors who graduated from the University of Oxford, which is Anand’s alma mater; and 500 Startups, a San Francisco venture capital firm.

The company has facilitated deals involving people outside of sports, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, a famed astrophysicist and author. But it is almost exclusively working with athletes. As of now, 95 percent of the athletes are based in the U.S., but OpenSponsorship is pursuing more deals in Europe and other regions.

“We were looking to expand beyond sports, but with college opening up that’s taken a lot of our focus,” Anand said. “Right now, we’re very focused on anything tangential to pro sports and the college space.”