Things are rolling for Fanzo, the Kirkland-based startup that helps sports fans keep up with the latest news.
The company just closed a $600,000 round led by Smilebox founder Andrew Wright, bringing total funding up to $1 million.
Fanzo, founded last year, aggregates any type of sports-related content — whether it’s a breaking news article or a fan photo posted on Instagram — and then uses an algorithm for each platform based on actions like re-tweets or Facebook likes to rank the content.
The end product is a filtered feed within the Fanzo app that aggregates the most popular articles, photos, videos and posts based on social influence instead of decisions made by an editor from a big publisher.
Fanzo released its 2.0 version a few weeks ago, which now highlights news and headlines more prominently in the “Top” feed. Co-founder Dana Dyksterhuis told us that the startup is seeing good reception.
“Since this release, we have consistently been a Top 100 sports app whereas we were in the Top 250 before,” she said.
Dyksterhuis added that she’s seeing more and more fans reading posts through Fanzo instead of traditional media outlets.
“This is super exciting for us as we’ve always known that our real-time platform weeds out the junk and generates the hottest items per team, super fast,” she said.
Dyksterhuis, a former news reporter and PR veteran, co-founded the company last year with Paul Ingalls, the former vice president of technology at Smilebox who heard a 15-second pitch from Dyksterhuis for Fanzo’s concept at a Lean Startup event that he was attending.
Other investors in Fanzo include Rudy Gadre, Geoff Entress, former Macromedia CEO Rob Burgess, Serena Glover and Carlo von Schroeter.
“We are very excited about having these investors on board as they share our passion for sports and have incredible experience and connections to bring to the table,” Dyksterhuis said.
For more insight into Fanzo’s story, listen to the GeekWire podcast this past March when we welcomed Dyksterhuis into our studios to talk about the future of being a sports fan.
