Pickstar attracts sizeable investments
Adelaide founded startup, Pickstar Group, which matches brands and consumers’ briefs and budgets via its two-sided marketplace, (Pickstar), and its talent activation platform, (VLAST), has raised over $5M in funding from its initial call for capital raising.
The investment provides the rapidly growing business a strong pathway for further international growth, future development of its technology and the ongoing hiring of quality, global people.
Pickstar was founded in 2016 by former professional athletes, James Begley and Matthew Pavlich. The Company has swiftly become Australia's largest marketplace to match and book inspirational stars for events, social media and marketing campaigns, as well as brand ambassadorships. Pickstar is attracting major deals with organisations such as NFL, Cricket Australia and English Premier League clubs.
Pickstar is where brands, corporates and consumers transact with stars via a matching and probability platform. The platform is powered by unified code and comprehensive machine learning and is trusted by the biggest brands and endorsed by the world's biggest stars.
Despite challenges tied to the Coronavirus Pandemic in 2021, Pickstar significantly grew its group revenue and more than quadrupled its local and international headcount- investing heavily into UK and U.S.-based resources to roll-out the Pickstar Marketplace and its software-as-a-service (Saas) platform, VLAST. The launch of the Marketplace product in the UK was a huge success, significantly outperforming revenue targets, while VLAST secured a host of major global rights owner and agency clients.
Pavlich had the following to say about the news, “I’m incredibly proud with the support we’ve received from investors and the continued interest and commitment to our business. Igniting meaningful moments with inspirational stars was an idea that James and I believed in from the beginning and we have worked hard with some incredibly talented and passionate people to bring it to life.”
“This investment enables us to take the business to the next level here in Australia and help grow the UK, while getting us ready for our U.S. expansion - it's huge momentum for the team,” explained Pavlich.
A major focus for Pickstar will be activating their VLAST product. VLAST is a purpose-built and first-to-market platform that automates and powers the management of athlete activations and operations for teams, agencies and sporting leagues around the world. VLAST is now the leading global software provider for international leagues, clubs and teams to track and measure player appearances and activations.
“VLAST is solving some major problems for athletes and teams around the world and the interest in what it can do has been immense. With our SaaS product, we are attracting major deals with organisations such as NFL, Cricket Australia and English Premier League clubs,” added Pavlich.
“We are ready to scale after doing the hard yards of building, testing and understanding the market here in Australia and the UK,” concluded Pavlich.
About Pickstar
Pickstar Group offers a simple, online Marketplace that helps people to connect with sports stars, celebrities and personalities. It's end-to-end digital platform enables the fast and effective bookings of talent for any type of commercial arrangement.
Founded in 2016 by two former AFL athletes, James Begley and Matthew Pavlich, Pickstar Group has become the most trusted platform for facilitating paid talent engagements, large and small.
In addition to Pickstar's Marketplace, Pickstar Group offers VLAST, a tool created by athletes , for athletes . The tool offers talent and governing bodies an easy and efficient way to manage all aspects of valuable talent appearances and activations.. It improves the talent experience, reduces administrative costs, and removes human error, by empowering talent, agencies, brands, and rights owners to maintain and develop more meaningful relationships and measurement of talent appearances.
VLAST caters to the needs of the sponsorship, activation, and endorsement ecosystem. It offers a centralised dashboard providing automatic scheduling, messaging, and holistic overviews of the most important elements of talent activation.
With offices in Adelaide, New York and London, Pickstar Group's reach is truly global and with expansion into new star categories including chefs, media and wellness influencers, Pickstar can find a meaningful connection for any business and any opportunity.