Social sports gaming startup Joa wants to make live events more interactive for those on the couch. Ahead of its launch, it acquired a separate venture, GreenPark, focused 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 helped 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 told Sportico in 2020 ahead of the app’s launch. “We believe the fan needs to be much more a part of the team.” Deals with LaLiga and the NBA allowed users 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 get 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 steadfast, this idea of making fandom playable,” Grillo said. “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 big accelerant for us, especially as an early-stage startup,” Koch said of the acquisition, “but also to show that we’re really serious about cracking this code for the industry, and we’re going to move 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 asking you to go to an Xbox, we’re not asking you even to go to the App Store,” Koch said. “Go to X, we’re going to be there. Go to Discord, we’re going to be there.”
Koch added that Joa plans to use artificial intelligence to create content and better inform teams and leagues about user behavior.
“You hear a lot about how AI is supercharging programming,” he said. “We asked ourselves, well, what other roles could AI be really strong at?”
