Cardinal Sports Capital creates accelerator program with HPL Digital Sport partnership

Toronto-based investment firm Cardinal Sports Capital has formed a partnership with sports betting and fantasy brand consultants HPL Digital Sport, to create an accelerator program to stimulate mutual growth within the industry
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Toronto-based investment firm Cardinal Sports Capital has formed a partnership with sports betting and fantasy brand consultants HPL Digital Sport, to create an accelerator program to stimulate mutual growth within the industry. 

The program has been established to utilize the capabilities of both companies to help sports betting, igaming, sports technology and fantasy sports firms further their growth and become more successful.

Cardinal Sports Capital has detailed plans to invest between $75m-$100m into the project.

“While the attention surrounding the North American sports gaming market is high, market conditions have clearly become more challenging,” said Scott Secord, partner at Cardinal Sports Capital. 

“We see that it’s harder for even the best companies to navigate the complexities of the capital markets, investment needs, all while positioning themselves the right way with investors, potential strategic partners and customers.”

“We’ve partnered with HPLDS before on a number of mutual clients and feel our end-to-end services, now offered through the Accelerator Program, really complement what these early growth stage companies need.”

Helping develop the growth of companies in the sports betting and gaming industry, the program will provide services including shaping and creating business strategies for market growth, building relationships and introductions to targeted customers, vendors, partners, advisors, counsel and others to make key inroads and providing guidance on capital raises through a large collective investor network. 

HPL Digital Sport and Cardinal Sports Capital have previously partnered with each other on marketing communications strategies with Quarter4 and ThriveFantasy, among other clients.

“Many passionate and driven entrepreneurs come to us wanting to market their offerings to build mindshare and new users. But, a lack of investment dollars and a misunderstanding of what the investment community cares about, often creates real challenges to conducting business as they had hoped,” said Ed Moed, CEO of HPL Digital Sport. 

“This partnership with CSC will allow us to tap our wide-scale network of investors to allow these worthy companies the opportunity to close on their early rounds of investments, and leverage our experience and guidance as advisors to build, market, sell and conduct business as they had planned to.”

Kicking off the accelerator program, WagerWire, a proprietary sports betting futures marketplace firm, has become the first company to enrol.

Zach Doctor, Co-Founder and CEO at WagerWire, concluded: “We are excited to leverage the combined skills of CSC and HPLDS to help jumpstart our company. 

“The synergies between the two organizations align extremely well and, as a client, has made combined strategy calls, investor conversations, brand positioning initiatives, public relations goals, as well as overall workflow a seamless experience. 

“These two groups work hand-in-hand, which minimizes the complexity of having a few disconnected agencies help control different parts of our business.”