About

Athletopia is a business-driven spin-off company of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. It was founded under the belief that active participation in sport events can influence peoples’ happiness and overall well-being. Hence, we are developing a platform for sport running events powered by data-driven technology and our vision is empower organizers and sponsors to create better sport events by creating compelling experiences for all runners.

Solution & Product

We have created the platfrom Athletopia aiming to create value for organizers, sponsors and participants of a sport running event. Specifically, for organizers, we offer a one-stop-shop to register, manage and communicate with the runners as well as several add-on revenue drivers, while for sponsors the opportunity to integrate in the runner’s path to success through becoming a fan and a source of motivation based on psychographic data. At the end, for athletes, we assist to the creation a seamless running experience by having everything in one place.

Innovation & Scalability

We are only targets organizers; being event centric, it transcends the difficulty of reaching out to the number of athletes and other participants, whilst focusing on the underlying structures that support and facilitate their experiences. As such the overarching idea of Athletopia is one of business model innovation, which coupled with the basic technological enablers at first and equipped with the necessary machine learning algorithms later on can fully address the complexities of today’s local, regional, national and international events. Athletopia’s model, due to its event oriented logic, will swiftly foster large numbers of participants. This means that, unlike other similar models, it will soon be able to source a vast number of data about athletic preferences, demographics, psychographics, performances, repeatability and other data, that can in turn be leveraged to train the required algorithmic enablers and as such programmatically lead to increased value for runners, extended engagement with sponsors, and organizers.

Traction & achievements

We bootstrapped our launch in August 2019 with www.seamxsports.com (now athletopia.com), hosting the MVP admin panel for organizers. During 2022 we hosted 50 events and onboarded +9k runners to the platform.

Team & Why Us

Athletopia is university spin-off company. We strongly believe that its symbiotic relationship with a university lab gives the company an edge over the competition, since its development is buttressed by solid research evidence and constant validation in the field. We strongly believe that our unique and diverse mix of people (practitioners and scientists) is one of our strengths. Regarding our growth strategy, as mentioned above we aim to onboard the organizer and let the organizer register his runners on the platform. With no need of targeting the end consumer, we’re creating a highly efficient and fast growing community through our B2B2C approach. Our roadmap has three well-defined stages. On the first stage, we were aimed to develop our MVP, on the second stage to provide proof of concept (fast traction on the Greek market), and on the third one to roll out internationally.

Funding Needs

Investment opportunity: Founders: €40k (completed, 2019), Pre-seed €120k (completed, 2022) Seed €400k (Q2 2023)