Another sports technology business has Houston in its sights after its recent funding.
Cincinnati-based Lunchtable.ai is set to open a Houston office in early July, founder Joshua Reid confirmed to the Houston Business Journal. That comes just a few months after the company was selected for DivInc Houston’s Spring 2024 Sports Tech Accelerator.
The new offices will be within Houston-based venture capital firm Mercury’s space at 3737 Buffalo Speedway. The location is also home to South Loop Ventures, a VC firm focused on founders of color. South Loop Ventures backed Lunchtable for its $2.4 million seed round, which was announced this week.
“I don’t question fate. If it’s working, I’m going to lean into it,” Reid said in an interview with the HBJ. “When we found out sports tech was the market we needed to be in, we didn’t fight it because that’s what the market was telling us. Houston was telling us that we need to have a shop here.”
Other investors in the seed round for Lunchtable include Cleveland’s JumpStart Ventures, Cincinnati’s Cintrifuse Capital, Pittsburgh’s Black Tech Nation Ventures, Ohio Gateway Tech Fund, San Francisco’s Kobol Fund and angel investors.
The funding allows LunchTable to build out its team and refine its sales process. The startup currently has five full-time employees and is looking to add a chief technology officer, among other roles.
Lunchtable targets passive fans and turns them into brand ambassadors for their favorite sports teams. The teams will produce content that posts automatically to the social media feeds of pre-approved users, while those users can collect points and rewards based on how the content performs. Reid pivoted the concept toward sports fans after previously aiming to turn company employees into brand ambassadors.
Lunchtable is going through pilot tests with the MLB's Cincinnati Reds and FC Cincinnati of Major League Soccer. The goal is to sign 20 teams by March 2025.
The company’s expansion to Houston has been touted by local advocates as a signal of the Bayou City’s sports technology potential. Blair Garrou, managing partner at Mercury, told the HBJ that the concentration of current and former athletes living in Houston is an important ingredient, as athletes can become angel investors for new startups.
“It’s like saying, where should life sciences go? Life sciences should go where big pharma is,” Garrou said. “Where should sports tech go? Sports tech should go where athletes live.”
Houston has not historically been a hotbed for sports technology investment, however. Data that Crunchbase provided to the Houston Business Journal shows that in 2023, the greater Houston area tied with the greater Baltimore area for last place for total value of sports technology deals, with only three deals totaling approximately $1 million struck last year.
Reid said that since he began working with Houston’s innovation ecosystem, he’s had conversations with innovation leaders from Houston sports teams such as the Houston Rockets, the Houston Astros and the Houston Dynamo. But no deals for local pilots have been reached — yet.
“Just for the Texas teams alone, between the professional teams and the collegiate teams, we could own the entire market that we're in,” Reid said.
Cincinnati Business Courier Digital Editor Liz Engel contributed to this report.
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