Sports news aggregator startup Sportsmanias has raised $1 million in venture funding as it seeks to expand its reach by providing a new team-focused sports app that will enable users to track hard news about their favorite teams by focusing on news and reports from team beat writers.
The recent $1 million investment has come from Mas Equity Partners, which is led by founder Jorge Mas, who also serves as Chairman of the Board of MasTec, a $4 billion infrastructure engineering and construction company based in Coral Gables, Fla.
Sportsmanias.com, founded just last fall, has an existing web site and app that serves as a news aggregator for all major US sports including NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and the NCAA. In addition it covers a wide variety of domestic and international soccer news, teams and leagues. The news feed that a user gets can be customized to meet their sporting preferences. The company was founded by the mother/son team of Aymara Del Aguila, an advertising executive and son Vicente J. Fernandez, a student-athlete and sports writer at the University of Chicago.
Now the company has enhanced its presence in the mobile digital world with an updated free app for both iOS and Android powered devices. The Team News app will focus on providing news that has been originated by beat writers that regularly cover the team, rather than just culling all news stories that are generated about a team across the nation, often from sources that do not have direct contact and coverage of the team.
The app does not just exclusively provide beat reporter news on a specific team. It also provides team and player tweets. Two interesting features are the Rumor Filter, which collects league and team-specific rumors from top rumor sites, and a Video Filter, which aggregates footage from YouTube and Twitter.
These features have the ability to data mine rumors and videos in real time so that a fan can be up-to-date on what is going on as well as what is suspected to be about to happen. Other new features for the app include a scoreboard to follow ongoing games, and keyword search capabilities.
The company said that it currently is getting 500,000 unique visitors to its web site monthly and that with the new features and capabilities of its app it expects that it will see a strong jump to 1.5 million monthly visitors by year end.
The upgrades look to be a very good move by the company because increasingly flexibility and customization are now becoming standard in sports apps. The rumor and video filters are solid features that will help them create separation from many of the current apps that are now available, as many as just text based, and any rumors tend to be generated in house. However the need for these features, particularly video is obvious and others are headed in this direction.
