Refr Sports, a Minneapolis-based sports startup, raised $535,000 in its pre-seed funding round, led by Groove Capital.
Groove Capital invested $250,000. Carson Kipfer, co-founder of SportsEngine, and angel investor Daren Cotter also participated in this round.
Refr Sports created a referee-management platform to efficiently coordinate interactions between referees, sports organizations and the "assigners" who assign referees to particular games. The application features scheduling tools, connectivity for referees and assigners, and automated payments.
The company participated in fall 2023 Beta cohort, the third cohort for the Minnesota Twins Accelerator powered by Techstars and won the MN Cup student division in 2022.
Huck Sorock, co-founder and CEO of Refr Sports, said the company was planning to raise $400,000 but over-subscribed and raised $135,000 more than anticipated. Sorock said 50% of the funding will go toward software development with six full-time developers working on the product; 20% of the funding will go toward internal assigners; 20% will go toward Sorock, his co-founder, Wyatt Gustafson, and the company's customer success hire; and 10% will go toward legal fees, travel and conferences.
Sorock said he started the company because of the need for a more efficient system for assigners to assign referees to games, from recruiting referees, coordinating game schedules and paying referees promptly.
"I grew up here in South Minneapolis and like most kids who grew up here was obsessed with hockey growing up," Sorock said. "I got into refereeing in high school and got to experience a lot of the downsides of the industry, but I didn't know how far down it extended. I thought it was just hockey in Minnesota that was messed up. Ultimately, I played professional hockey on the East Coast and started talking to referees across the bench and realized it was a problem halfway across the country, too. I started doing some market research and found it was a problem across all sports."
Sorock said most people do not know how referees are assigned to games and that the assigner position exists.
"Sports teams want nothing to do with the management of the referees and will contract an assigner to assign the games," Sorock said. "Assigners are managing somewhere around 20,000 games a year and are using spreadsheets to manage the games, cash and paper checks for payments and Facebook and paper flyers for recruiting. What we are trying to do is slowly selling our software as a SaaS [software as a service] to these assigners and then find the really good assigners and hire them on our team."
Refr Sports takes a 3% processing fee from sports organizations paying out referees through the platform. In 2024, the company plans to assign more than 40,000 games, which equates Refr Sports processing approximately $4 million to referees, Sorock said.
"We have the foundation of the platform built and plan to work on the bells and whistles of the application," Sorock said. "We'll have mileage tracking for how far the referee drove to the field and preferences in the backend such as the radius where the referee wants to work as well. We're also going to focus on executing and trying to get sales."
The company will be active in Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Michigan and Arkansas by May. Currently, four assigners are using the platform, eight are committed and the company hired its first internal assignor.
