According to Buzzer, its app provides “a seamless user and viewing experience” by aggregating live sports streaming rights and letting users to set up customized alerts based on their preferences. Buzzer’s current league partners include NBA League Pass, PGA Tour and NHL, and the company says it has more deals in the works.
“There’s nothing more exciting than a close game or buzzer beater — those are the moments we live for as players,” Patrick Mahomes, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback and Super Bowl LIV champion, said in a statement provided by the company. “Buzzer ensures fans never miss these moments in real-time and helps us make our connections with them stronger, especially with younger, mobile-first sports fans. I believe Buzzer represents the future of live sports and I’m thrilled to join them on their journey.”
Buzzer is currently in an “early access” release phase, available for download on iOS in Apple’s App Store and on Android in the Google Play store. For now, users who download can build profiles by selecting preferences for their favorite players, teams and leagues; they’re then added to a waitlist before they get full access to the app, at which point they are able to consume live content. The platform will officially launch later this year.
“We envision Buzzer becoming the discovery and curation tool that brings Gen Z fans back to live sports with simple access to ephemeral moments,” Han, founder and CEO of Buzzer, said in a statement. He touted his company’s “partner-first approach,” which he said will give leagues and other sports-rights holders new opportunities to reach new fans and generate new revenue streams.
Other investors in Buzzer include athletes Pat Connaughton, Madison Hammond, Scotty James, Christian McCaffrey and Apolo Ohno; team owners David Blitzer (New Jersey Devils, Philadelphia 76ers), GSW Sports Ventures (an affiliate of the Golden State Warriors), Steve Kaplan (D.C. United, Swansea City), Steve Koonin (Atlanta Hawks), Lerner Enterprises (Washington Nationals), Stephen Pagliuca (Boston Celtics), Michael Jordan and Curtis Polk (Charlotte Hornets, 23XI Racing), Steve Simon (Indiana Pacers, Indiana Fever), Jeffrey Vinik (Tampa Bay Lightning) and WISE Ventures (shared ownership of Minnesota Vikings, Orlando City SC, Orlando Pride).
And there are more Buzzer investors: Ros Gold-Onwude, Ibrahim Hamad, Devin Johnson, Estee Portnoy and Taylor Rooks, and investment firms Black Capital, Chetrit Ventures, JDS Sports, Jump Capital, LionTree Partners, OneTeam Partners, Targa Partners, and Micromanagement Ventures (the fund of the late David Stern).
Buzzer’s Series A round comes after it raised $4 million in seed funding last year.
Co-lead investor Sapphire Sport, a fund of Sapphire Ventures, says its limited partners include City Football Group (owners of Manchester City), owners and investors from the NFL, MLB, NBA, WNBA, NHL and MLS, and entertainment organizations, family offices and institutional investors. Canaan is an early-stage VC firm that boasts more than $5 billion under management.
With the funding, Sapphire Sport partner Michael Spirito is joining Buzzer’s board of directors. “Buzzer is addressing the biggest challenge facing the global sports industry, which is how to make live media rights more accessible and ultimately more valuable,” Spirito commented.
NASCAR: Michael Jordan has a new goal for Bubba Wallace
NBA legend Michael Jordan has a new goal for Bubba Wallace following 23XI Racing’s first ever top five finish in the NASCAR Cup Series.
Entering Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Pocono Raceway, the 19th race on the 36-race 2021 schedule, Bubba Wallace was one of only four points-eligible full-time drivers who had not yet secured a top 10 finish this year.
The other three? Front Row Motorsports rookie Anthony Alfredo, StarCom Racing’s Quin Houff, and Rick Ware Racing’s Josh Bilicki, three drivers with whom Wallace should probably not be keeping company in any statistical category.
Wallace drives the #23 Toyota for the Joe Gibbs Racing-affiliated 23XI Racing in their first season as a Cup Series team, and as expected, there have been growing pains. Still, the 27-year-old Mobile, Alabama native had high hopes entering the year, including making the playoffs and recording at least two victories.
While he has not yet achieved either one, he did manage to finish in a team-best fifth place in Sunday’s 140-lap race around the three-turn, 2.5-mile (4.023-kilometer) Tricky Triangle in Long Pond, Pennsylvania.
This result, which was just his fourth top five finish in 131 career starts, bumped him up into a 19th place tie in the point standings, 54 points below the playoff cut line with seven regular season races remaining on the schedule. His previous best finish for the team had been an 11th place effort at Dover International Speedway in mid-May.
NBA legend Michael Jordan, who co-owns the new team along with Joe Gibbs Racing driver Denny Hamlin, took notice. And now he has a new weekly goal for Wallace.
As reported by Sports Business Journal‘s Adam Stern, Wallace received a text from Jordan after his fifth place finish which stated that his expectation is now that Wallace will finish every race inside the top 10.
Given the fact that this top five finish was also Wallace’s first top 10 finish in 19 starts for 23XI Racing, plus the fact that it came in a fuel mileage race where several frontrunners had to pit late, this is probably a pretty lofty goal.
However, it is also pretty clear that there have been some serious strides made by the new team. Through 12 races, Wallace had finished no higher than 16th place. But in the last seven races, he has recorded five top 14 finishes.
So running in the top 10 consistently is a reasonable goal at this point, especially since Wallace had been performing well enough to consistently finish inside the top 15 ahead of his first top five finish of the year.
Hamlin had also said that his goal for the team was to be running better in the summer than in the spring and running better in the fall than in the summer. Jordan’s goal for Wallace perfectly aligns with that goal and is effectively a continuation of what the driver of the #23 Toyota has done over the last few weeks.
Do bear in mind the fact that Jordan said at the beginning of the year that he doesn’t sign checks for losers and he expected Wallace to win. Can he climb the next step and finish in the top 10 consistently?
Wallace will go for his second consecutive and overall top 10 and top five finish of the 2021 season in this Sunday afternoon’s Jockey Made in America 250 Presented by Kwik Trip at Road America. This race is set to be broadcast live on NBC beginning at 2:30 p.m. ET.
Wallace’s fifth place run was a significant one, as it matched the sort of expectations that many outsiders had for 23XI Racing — largely due to its co-owner, NBA legend Michael Jordan — when it entered the NASCAR Cup Series this season.
With its first Top 5 in the books, the expectations of Jordan are now rising to match his team’s best finish ever.
According to a report by Adam Stern of Sports Business Journal, Wallace shared that both Jordan and 23XI investor Curtis Polk were “ecstatic and pumped up” after their team’s fifth-place run at Pocono. Jordan also sent a text message to Wallace, where he shared the standard for his driver moving forward.
“Now he expects a Top 10 every week,” Wallace said. “So now we have to put our foot down and keep digging.”
While the star power of Jordan combined with Wallace’s own ascending star set the bar high for 23XI Racing in the public, internal expectations for the team’s first season were much more guarded: Team co-owner Denny Hamlin recently told CBS Sports that his team was “pretty close to where I thought that we would be” near the halfway mark of their first season.
Those sentiments towards the team’s progression, even as they seemed to max out in the 11th-15th range, were shared by Jordan.”Everyone talks about how he’s a winner, he’s a champion, yeah, but he’s also a realistic person,” Wallace said in a report by Dustin Albino of Jayski.com. “He wants to win, but he knows what it will take for us to get there. It’s more from me, it’s from the team, it’s a more group effort.”While Sunday marked the first time 23XI Racing has cracked the Top 10 in the finishing order, the team has hardly been lacking in performance so far in 2021. Wallace has led a career-high 49 laps and has finished 16th or better eight times in 19 races.
REAL TIME NET WORTH
$2.1B
as of 6/30/21
- Regarded by most as the NBA’s greatest all-time player, Michael Jordan won six titles with the Chicago Bulls.
- His salary during his career totaled $90 million, but he has earned $1.8 billion (pre-tax) from such corporate partners as Nike, Hanes and Gatorade.
- MJ joined sports-betting firm DraftKings as a special advisor to the board and an investor in September 2020.
- He also became a NASCAR team co-owner in late 2020.
- Jordan, who owns the Charlotte Hornets, agreed to sell a minority stake in a 2019 deal that valued the NBA team at $1.5 billion.
Stats
Age58
Source of WealthCharlotte Hornets, endorsements, Self Made
Residence Jupiter, Florida
Citizenship United States
Marital Status Married
Children 5
Education Bachelor of Arts/Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Jordan was the NBA’s highest-paid player only two seasons during his 15-year playing career.
Jordan’s first contract with Nike, signed in 1984, was worth $500,000 per year, plus royalties. Nike paid him more than $100 million last year.
I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot…and missed. I’ve failed over, and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
Michael Jordan
