How GiveMeSport used Kriya's invoice finance facility

The two founders of GiveMeSport met while working at another company focusing on user targeting within the sports market. It wasn’t long before they realised their knowledge could provide a powerful service in the relatively new world of social media.

The company runs a successful sports news website as well as a series of social sites with upwards of 25 million fans. Its customers are major advertisers who pay for space on the site.

“We knew we could successfully connect brands with fans at scale, even when social media was in its infancy.” says Nick Thain, CEO of GiveMeSport. Initially trading as a social media agency, the business changed its focus to become the leading sports publisher it is today, under the brand GiveMeSport, which launched in 2013.

“Essentially, we moved from advising other people how to do social media, to doing it ourselves with proprietary technology.” says Thain “We had to adapt very quickly, as brands like Facebook would often change strategy without warning and we needed to move with them.”

The need for funding

GiveMeSport came to Kriya for help managing their cash flow back in February 2015. Because of the seasonality of sports advertising, stable cash flow can be a challenge: “People are more interested in certain sports at certain times” says Thain “there’s things like transfer windows and big match weekends that are huge traffic drivers.”

When they started looking for funding, however, they found that banks were unhelpful. “The banks that we spoke to didn’t understand our business model at all.” says Thain “They had never even heard of one of our biggest customers. To us, it just seemed like a non-starter – if you’re not a ‘bricks and mortar’ type of business, they’re not interested.”

“Kriya understood our business straight away, and all of our customers were already recognised on the platform, which made the whole process so much easier. We could pick and choose which invoices we financed at reasonable rates; it just seemed a far better alternative for us. They could provide us with the working capital that was crucial to the next stage of our growth.”

Global ambitions

GiveMeSport has gone from strength to strength, recently announcing a reverse take-over deal with Canadian AI company Breaking Data Corp. The move will see them listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq QX.

The company has future ambitions to grow across North America, potentially expanding into Australia.

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