Mobile sports betting startup ZenSports closes additional $770K+ in seed funding

ZenSports, a mobile peer-to-peer sports betting marketplace, has raised additional $770K+ in seed funding from angel investors. The new funding follows a $675K raised in October 2019 as part of a broader $1M+ seed Round after launching its sports betting app in March 2019.

Founded in 2016 by Etan Mizrahi-Shalom and Mark Thomas, the San Francisco, California-based ZenSports is a mobile peer-to-peer sports betting marketplace where anyone can create and accept sports bets with anyone else in the world, without the need for a centralized bookmaker. ZenSports is the only native mobile app that offers peer-to-peer sports betting on the App and Play Stores.

ZenSports is truly peer-to-peer in every sense of the word. Bettors can quickly and easily fund their accounts from their phone, using fiat or cryptocurrencies. Bettors can create their OWN bets with their own odds and terms, and others in the marketplace will accept those bets. This gives bettors a cheaper, faster, and more trustworthy process for wagering on sports than traditional online sports books offer. Makers of bets are even responsible for submitting their own results, with a full penalty and reward system in place to ensure that all bettors act in good faith.

With its continued rapid growth, the startup started receiving inbound interest from additional angel investors in December 2019, and decided to open up a new round of funding to accommodate those interested investors. In just 10 weeks since then, the company syndicated and closed an additional $770K+ in funding across multiple angel investors.

Here’s how this new funding round played out according to ZenSports Co-Founder & CEO, Mark Thomas, “After officially closing our $1M+ Seed Round in October 2019, we felt more than comfortable that we had enough funding to execute on our growth strategy for 2020. However, we had numerous angel investors who approached us about putting more money into our company. We decided to offer a time-boxed raise without a target amount for these investors who approached us and shared our vision of how decentralized, peer-to-peer sports betting using cryptocurrencies was the future. We were fortunate to have a lot of choices in the investors we decided to ultimately bring on board, and we’re thrilled to be working with them as we continue to grow and scale ZenSports.”

The new funding will be heavily invested into paid customer acquisition channels. According to Thomas, “Up to this point, we haven’t spent any money on paid marketing to acquire new customers. Instead, we’ve focused on optimizing the post-customer acquisition and retention funnel through constant product iteration and via our SPORTS Rewards Program. We’ve got incredibly loyal customers who are very active on a daily basis in placing bets in our app. It’s now time to get very aggressive in growing our overall customer base via paid marketing.”

To help accomplish this, the company recently hired an experienced marketer, Mark Saldana, to become the company’s new Chief Marketing Officer. Mark brings a wealth of digital marketing experience to technology and consumer brands and will be an integral piece to the company’s revenue and growth plans.