BGF's sports tech play was a waiting game

The bank-backed fund spent five years talking to Urban Zoo

Hello Rainmakers,

Are you sick of football after last night?

Maybe, but the onset of the domestic season in a few weeks time has concentrated minds on the massive reach sport has more generally, with diverse and scattered fan bases all over the globe.

Here’s a deal of its time, the £20m investment by BGF into Urban Zoo, a sports tech business which provides digital infrastrcture and a content template for clubs and brands.

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You’ve got to give BGF’s Rhys Davenport some credit for his patience.

The winner of the Rising Star award at the North West Rainmaker Awards has been talking to sports tech business Urban Zoo for five years.

The deal was inked this week, with BGF investing £20m in the business which builds digital platforms for leading sports clubs.

Describing Urban Zoo as “a brilliant business” he said the bank backed fund has been talking with founders for half a decade: “Five years of relationship building has contributed to this outcome and the Urban Zoo team have consistently delivered ahead of expectations over that period.”

Founded in 2013, the Warrington-based company provides world-leading digital platforms for sports brands, clubs, and federations – across mobile, web, streaming, e-commerce, and retail – to drive fan engagement and strengthen revenue streams. It has been backed up until now by Manchester entrepreneur Phil Hodari, and with investment from the founders.

The intention is for the BGF’s investment to support the scale-up of the development of Urban Zoo’s proprietary technology, and to grow across international markets, particularly in North America, which has been gripped by football during the 2026 World Cup.

If you’ve ever wondered why every football club website, ticketing page and news site feels consistent, and things are where you expect them to be, then the answer is Urban Zoo, which has disrupted the highly competitive global digital sports market through a differentiated all-in-one platform solution, Gamechanger, which they’ve also registered as a trademark.

It was developed in collaboration with global sports leaders and organisations to streamline content workflows, drive ROI, and deliver feature and data-rich websites and apps.

Despite the AI-induced wobbles amongst investors about any software platform, BGF have invested with the hope that Urban Zoo can build on its significant share of the UK market, working with more than 60 professional clubs across all tiers of the English Football League, including Aston Villa, Everton and Nottingham Forest, leading Scottish clubs Hibs and Celtic, as well as the Professional Darts Corporation, Motocross GP, and the Rugby Football League.

Urban Zoo was born out of a games developer Chris Grannell’s frustration at seeing clubs either bodge together clunky off‑the‑shelf tools or burn fortunes on one‑off builds that were outdated almost as soon as they went live. Instead, its platform gives rights‑holders a clean, flexible template that looks and feels big‑league but can be run by a skeleton back‑office team as easily as by a 15‑strong marketing department. New kit launches, changes of sponsor, VIP streams for overseas owners – are all designed to be dropped in and deployed without drama.

That pragmatism runs through the business model. Urban Zoo has grown steadily and quietly, staying close to break-even for much of its life rather than chasing vanity metrics or overpaying for growth. So far, the business has only ever filed abbreviated accounts, so we can’t see sales an profits growth, but it is steadily profitable according to one person familiar with the business.

The result is a capital‑light, profitable software business that can serve a Conference side and a Premier League club on essentially the same economics – a genuine mass‑market product in a sector that tends to obsess over only the top few global names.