PressBox, an artificial intelligence startup that automates the production of digital content for sports leagues and media companies, has raised a $2M seed round led by Relay Ventures. Capital Eleven, Pax Holdings (owner/operator of The Sporting News) and Alumni Ventures also participated. Individual angels include ex-NFL COO Mary Ann Turcke (who is now a PressBox advisor), Sporting News co-CEO Shaun Koiner, Sporting News VP/Media Kerri Mattioli and Coinbase Senior Dir Dave Marks (former VP/Engineering at Bleacher Report). The raise brings PressBox’s total funding to date to $2.8M.
Founded in 2024 by engineering executives Brian Hough (CEO), Tory Briggs and Andy Crum, PressBox bills itself as an AI platform that helps sports leagues and media companies personalize digital content to serve to fans. Hough and Briggs previously worked for Bleacher Report, where they helped develop the company’s “Team Stream” app.
“We have agents that are keeping tabs on everything that is going on in a sport,” Hough said of PressBox, which he added has more than a dozen clients, including Fanatics, The Sporting News, Alt Sports Data, The Curling Group/Rock League and World Surf League. “We are helping, for example, a league cover all of the media coverage, all of the social conversation, and then also sitting on top of their structured data. The traditional stuff [PressBox produces] is an injury report, or a game recap. But it could also be stat-driven. ‘This player that you love is about to break this record or reach this milestone.’ [The agents] raise that to the team and allow them to turn that into content in a variety of modalities.”
Such modalities include articles and email newsletters -- including multilingual translations -- and personalized audio or highlight packages. Hough said PressBox is targeting emerging sports properties as clients and envisions growing into an all-in-one content management system.
“If I’m a brand new league, do I want to go and get 17 tools, or do I want to get something that can handle my email communication, be the CMS for my website, handle push notifications and messaging -- and build that in from the jump as a centralized source that can hook into my existing data sources,” Hough said. “We see that opportunity.”
The capital raise will be used for hiring across product, data and engineering roles, with the company now focused on expanding its client base into more sports and product to include more multimodal and publishing capabilities. PressBox has five employees as of this writing, including its co-founders and the recently hired Kevin Jackson -- former VP/Digital Content at ESPN, Exec Dir of Digital Editorial Content at Fox Sports and Chief Content Officer at Cllct -- as Head of Editorial Product.
