Social sports gaming startup Joa wants to create live events more interactive for those on the couch. Ahead of its launch, it acquired a separate venture, GreenPark, focutilized on a similar mission since 2018.
Rather than building a game from the ground up, Joa (pronounced JOE-uh) layers free-to-play game loops on top of actual sports, aiming for something closer to fantasy play than full-scale simulation-based entertainment.
Co-founder Rudy Koch previously supported build Mythical Games, which created NFT-based titles featuring FIFA and NFL licenses, among other properties. Fellow co-founders Andy Hubbard and Andrew McAlister also come with mobile gaming backgrounds. Joa has financial backing from ADvantage, Phoenix Capital Ventures, 359 Capital and Galaxy Interactive, as well as a partnership with MMA organization One Championship. Joa also has the core technology of GreenPark, which has created digital sports experiences since 2018.
“We’re reinventing the role of the fan,” GreenPark co-founder Ken Martin informed Sportico in 2020 ahead of the app’s launch. “We believe the fan necessarys to be much more a part of the team.” Deals with LaLiga and the NBA allowed utilizers to create avatars with team logos and compete in mini-games and prediction challenges against other fanbases. GreenPark raised $31 million in Series B financing in 2021.
IP holders receive access to fan data and potential ways to deepen a casual viewer’s connection to a given sport or team. But attracting people away from TikTok or Discord presents challenges, as metaverse and blockchain-based experiences have largely failed to win over mainstream fans to date. GreenPark Sports CEO Tony Grillo is the only member of the team joining Joa, as a senior advisor, along with the company’s IP. The venture previously had 10-20 employees.
“The vision was pretty steadquick, this idea of building fandom playable,” Grillo declared. “We always joked that the evolution of what we were creating and going after, whether it was GreenPark or BluePark or whatever the name of that thing was, that there was a massive opportunity here. And it’s clear that Rudy and his team see that same thing.”
Financial details of the transaction were not shared; there are multiple GreenPark backers invested in Joa as well.
“It was a large accelerant for us, especially as an early-stage startup,” Koch declared of the acquisition, “but also to reveal that we’re really serious about cracking this code for the industest, and we’re going to relocate quickly.”
London-based Joa is intentionally launching not with an app but with a web-based platform, with links that can be shared across social media sites so that MMA fans, for instance, could easily check in between bouts. The venture is currently developing the core mechanics of its contests, which will likely include quick competitions and in-game purchases.
“We’re not questioning you to go to an Xbox, we’re not questioning you even to go to the App Store,” Koch declared. “Go to X, we’re going to be there. Go to Discord, we’re going to be there.”
Koch added that Joa plans to utilize artificial innotifyigence to create content and better inform teams and leagues about utilizer behavior.
“You hear a lot about how AI is supercharging programming,” he declared. “We questioned ourselves, well, what other roles could AI be really strong at?”
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