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Lore-led trio building tech company to give fan experience a Jump

As a child, Marc Lore wanted to be a farmer so he could grow things. As an adult, he’s done just that, albeit as an entrepreneur. He has since created companies that he has sold to Amazon and Walmart, respectively, for nearly $4 billion combined.

The latest seed he’s put into the ground is called Jump. The company was quietly founded in the fall of 2021 alongside former baseball star Alex Rodriguez, with whom Lore is a part-owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx, and fellow Bucknell graduate and entrepreneur, Jordy Leiser.

The founding trio is trying to create an end-to-end fan experience platform, what Jump’s website calls “the operating system for live sports events.” Jump’s white-label software will connect all the various aspects of the live sports fan experience — parking, ticketing, merchandise, food and beverage, as well as more creative aspects such as dynamic in-game ticketing or augmented reality activations. For most teams and venues, the tech powering those segments of the live experience are usually siloed, causing operators to miss out on valuable data that could create a better fan experience through personalization and hit untapped revenue streams.

“You start to see the excess value for a team,” said Leiser, the company’s CEO. “There are empty seats, there are people who would go to games but don’t want to go to all the games, the offers aren’t personalized. We could deliver such a better experience.”

Marc Lore, who spoke at SBJ Tech Week, is now a minority owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx.marc bryan-brown

Jump only recently emerged from stealth operational mode with the announcement of a $20 million funding raise and is still “quarters” away from a finished product, according to Leiser. He said the company is deep in the process of building a new product for the industry, no small undertaking. Once the product is ready and deployed, fans won’t notice Jump’s presence as they use their team’s app but will experience a “beautifully designed app” that will be branded and tailored specifically to the team client by Jump.

“These mobile experiences should be amazing,” said Leiser, who first met and befriended Lore at a Bucknell University alumni shindig roughly 15 years ago. “These are multibillion-dollar brands. They shouldn’t be put in templatized applications.”   

Jump grew out of Lore and Rodriguez’s interest in buying the New York Mets a few years ago. That process exposed them to the inner workings of a pro sports team, during which they noticed a sports industry-wide struggle with disjointed tech stacks inhibiting more fruitful relationships between teams and fans.

Software platforms that address those issues exist in the retail (Shopify) and restaurant worlds (Toast); no entity in sports has tied it all together yet. Removing as many walls as possible and creating real-time, API-driven interoperability will be foundational to the new product. Following the Shopify or Toast roadmap, developing simple and easy data analysis tools will be key to Jump helping teams and venues make sense of the richer data they’ll be capturing, which is “basic stuff that Amazon does that direct-to-consumer businesses have been doing for a while,” Leiser noted.

Jump plans on building its own primary ticketing solution. But there are many aspects of the live sports fan experience that Jump will not be building, namely e-commerce or mobile food ordering; those will be integrated. Yet the pricing and packaging of many offers through those channels feel stale or rigid, something Jump hopes to change by plugging into those systems, then building on top of them.

“We see an opportunity to create a system by which the ticketing is all real-time, where there’s no such thing as I get my ticketing out before the game and then it closes,” Lore explained at this month’s SBJ Tech Week in New York, where he also revealed his childhood ambition. “You could be in the third quarter of a football game and be at a bar and be really excited and literally just come into the arena. Or you could be in a seat, somebody can leave in the ninth inning. Soon as that person leaves, those seats open up, you could literally jump to those seats in a reverse auction. And so, the idea is that any open seat around an arena would always be filled by definition because the price would just keep dropping until somebody jumped there.”

Jump’s focus will be fandom, not solely ticketing or the in-venue experience. At SBJ Tech Week, Lore posited that maybe Jump could be the basis for augmented-reality experiences for the fan who stayed at home to watch the game, or for different kinds of audio broadcasts, whether for fans that are novices in the sport or a version heavy on advanced stats.

“We want to be at the fan level. We don’t want to be at the transaction level,” said Leiser. “We’re trying to be there as the system to build bridges between fans and teams and create that bond in a bigger way, and that ultimately grows franchise value and a stronger organization.”

The recent funding round takes Jump’s total funding to $30 million (initial funding came from the founders). Forerunner Ventures, which has major expertise in direct-to-consumer platforms, including lucrative exits from Warby Parker, Bonobos and Dollar Shave Club, led the funding round. Courtside Ventures, Mastry Ventures, Drive by DraftKings, and MetaLab, which has built user interfaces for companies like Uber, Slack, and The Athletic, also participated. Other pro sports team owners are advising Jump as its product is built.

Jump has more than 20 employees but is looking to add more following its recent funding boost. Beyond that, there wasn’t much else Leiser would share about the company’s roadmap for the coming months, including a targeted launch date for what could ultimately be a very complex product to build.

“For the balance of this year, the game plan is to continue to build our team and grow this product,” he said. “We’re working as fast as we can, we’re hiring as fast as we can, and I would say … soon.”

Editor’s note: This story is revised from the print edition.

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