Programmatic Sponsorship Sales on the Horizon as Anvara Bulks Up

Sports sponsorship is one of the last major marketing markets that still runs on handshakes, golf outings, and personal relationships. That may be about to change.

Online marketplace Anvara recently announced a $3.1 million seed round. It heralded investment from Roger Ehrenberg’s Game Changers Ventures, who leads the round, with Tom Rickett’s Marquee Ventures and athlete family office Sequel also headlining. 

The new round follows the $650,000 Anvara raised after launching in late 2024.

Anvara is an online marketplace for connecting marketers with sponsorship opportunities, a nascent “AirBnB of sports and live event sponsorships” Andrei Stenmark (co-founder, Anvara) said. The platform seeks to bring transparent opportunities and pricing to sports and the broader entertainment business. 

Raising the capital to feed its go-between goal could be a big deal. Fulfilling its potential would make Anvara the sports version of data-driven programmatic advertising platforms that connect marketers with online publishers en masse. 

“Anvara is to sponsorship what The Trade Desk is to advertising. [It makes] a liquid and efficient marketplace possible for buyers and sellers,” Ehrenberg said. “Owners of inventory —such as stadium and arena owners and event operators— are able to add features and data to their offerings in order to access the greatest pool of buyers who value the inventory the most.”

Snapchat, Gopuff, and Delta are among the vetted brands currently on the platform.

“[And] buyers have the chance to access the best branding and sponsorship opportunities that meet their needs, but [can] use data and algorithms to conduct the search, not a manual review of endless amounts of marketing materials,” Ehrenberg said.

The venture currently has $1 billion in sponsorship inventory available, including in-match visible TV signage for LAFC, three sponsorship tiers for the Montauk Music Festival, and title sponsorship of June’s PGA Tour Reno-Tahoe Open.

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Historically speaking, most sports and concert sponsorship deals between rights holders and brands get done person-to-person. A salesperson connects with marketing executives they know, or scratch like hell to get an introduction to someone they don’t, and pitch opportunities. And the marketing officer on the receiving end must take their word on value and other metrics.

The plus side is that a strong relationship between a team’s employees and a brand’s counterpart could lead to large, multi-year deals and a shared enthusiasm for innovation and expanding the partnership. 

But it leaves teams and events exposed to key man risk—if their top salesperson leaves, they take their connections with them. Another problem is that the system incentivizes pitching big deals to brands, leaving lots of smaller, unsold opportunities ignored. 

It also leaves brands wondering if they’re being overcharged due to their size. And for those without connections or exposure to a segment of the market, it’s hard to identify and lock in on opportunities.

Stenmark ran headlong into this problem operating his first start up, a laundry service for college students, while an undergrad at the University of Southern California. Efforts to sponsor USC football and other local events led him to see the space as “very archaic and fragmented in the sense there wasn’t a centralized place for discovery [and] there was zero price transparency. Just for me to get a simple sponsorship at a food and wine event would take months of planning and execution,” he said.

With Anvara, Stenmark and co-founder Nick Khalili have created a platform where inventory holders can present opportunities to a larger group of brands than they could ever hope to individually pitch. In return, marketers see the same prices all other brands see, along with additional information including the audience profile.

“Every brand has its ICP [or ideal customer profile]. We want the ability for every brand to come on here and find at least one thing they find useful and want to go activate,” Stenmark said. 

Brands don’t pay anything to use the Anvara platform. Sponsorship listers pay a fee that Stenmark said is generally well below typical sales commission rates.

Rights holders have the ability to tweak who sees their listing and information. That can wall off, say, banks if they already have a sponsor in the category, or specific companies they’ve pitched offline. 

On the brand side, CMOs can contact rights holders through the platform to get additional details or to discuss tweaking the opportunity. 

At the moment, Anvara is still in its chicken or egg phase of finding enough events/rights owners and brands to reach critical mass. The new funding, as well as the deep experience of its new VC partners, including Ehrenberg, should help the company get there.

“He was our dream investor,” Stenmark said.

That is because Ehrenberg was an early investor in The Trade Desk, the comp he uses to articulate Anvara’s ambitions. 

The publishing industry worked for decades as the sports and entertainment sponsorship business does now. However, by the mid-2000s, DoubleClick (now the basis of Google’s ad platform) began to revolutionize that industry as a central tech-driven ad broker. 

Today, The Trade Desk is considered an ad-tech leader, worth $15 billion.

The total addressable sports and event sponsorship market is much smaller than the $1 trillion online ad market, probably ~$150 billion today. But Anvara could expand that by unlocking smaller unsold or under-sold opportunities. 

And like Trade Desk, Anvara provides additional value to its users by leveraging technology to capture more granular data (think: from geofencing, consumer profiles from mobile phone companies, and pre- and post-event web traffic).

Still, it’s a legitimate question if the top rights holders —think NFL, Olympics, FIFA— will easily hand over their lucrative sponsorship business to an online platform.

Then again, technology has a way of easing friction and trimming costs over time, and that should draw plenty of interest.

“Ultimately, buyers of branding and sponsorship placements will resemble programmatic buyers of ad inventory, leveraging state of the art trading tools to identify, value and complete transactions,” Ehrenberg said. “This is the future, as it is of all marketplaces, and Anvara is leading the way in this deca-billion-dollar market.”