Teamworks continues rapid growth with fundraising round, acquisition

The news that Teamworks – an enterprise software as a service company for college and professional sports organizations – closed a $65 million Series E fundraising round and acquired ARMS Software represents just the latest consequential steps for the fast-growing company, which continues to bolster its all-encompassing operating system for sports.

The Durham, N.C.,-based company wants to digitize the entire athlete lifecycle – from recruit to student-athlete to alumni. The aspiration is that three to five years from now, CEO and founder Zach Maurides said, Teamworks will not just be the operating system for high performance in sports. Rather, it will be the operating system for high performance in a variety of industries. Teamworks aims to replace redundancy with efficiency. 

ARMS empowers more than 400 collegiate athletic departments with tools to recruit, manage compliance, automate operations and more. Maurides said the first touchpoint an athlete has is with ARMS. It’s the tool that is used with prospective student-athletes at the start of the recruiting process. Adding ARMS into Teamworks’ operating system, he said, allows Teamworks to have a larger and deeper role in the recruitment phase of the athlete lifecycle. Overall, Maurides said, it’s going to allow Teamworks to “go deeper in the early stages and then have a more complete solution in the later stages.”

Maurides believes the addition of ARMS Software accelerates his company’s pursuit of providing athletes a single mobile entryway, a one-stop locale aggregating their responsibilities on and off the field. The companies will leverage each other’s strengths.  

“When you look at the areas where each company is really strong, it’s incredibly complementary,” Maurides told On3. “Customers with ARMS and Teamworks have best-in-class technology in every area of their athletic department. Now with these two solutions coming together and integrating within the Teamworks Operating System for Sports, the amount of value we are going to create for the shared customers is incredible.”

Potential to ‘transform’ how sports organizations operate

The acquisition came only a few months after Teamworks acquired four other companies into its operating system in January: human performance firm Smartabase, academic support service Retain and alumni engagement platforms NextPlay and Grafted.

Dragoneer Investment Group, a San Francisco-based, growth-oriented investment firm, led the Series E round. The fundraising brought Teamworks’ total funding to $115 million in the last year and $165 million overall. A former Duke football player, Maurides founded the company in 2005 and launched it the following year, with Duke serving as the first university to use Teamworks with student-athletes and staff.

Christian Jensen, a partner at Dragoneer Investment Group, said in a statement that Teamworks checked all the boxes, including being a category-defining business and possessing a proven leadership team that thrived in large markets. Jensen said they were particularly excited by Teamworks’ vision for an integrated platform that will “fundamentally transform how sports and military organizations operate to support their athletes, service members and staff.”

Maurides said the new capital will continue to fund future acquisitions while expanding the company’s reach into new markets and areas related to elite human performance.

The fundraising round – achieved amid challenging economic headwinds – coupled with the ARMS acquisition continues Teamworks’ strong run of robust growth. In 2021, it launched INFLCR Verified to assist student-athletes in capitalizing on their NIL while remaining compliant and it acquired the sports performance nutrition platform Notemeal. Last year, Teamworks launched INFLCR Local Exchange to help local businesses and INFLCR Global Exchange to help national brands support student-athletes through compliant NIL deals. It also acquired Whistle, a college recruiting communication solution, and closed a $50 million Series D financing round led by Delta-v Capital.

Teamworks’ operating system now comprises Hub, INFLCR, Notemeal, Whistle, Communities, Smartabase, Retain, Pulse and ARMS. It works with more than 6,000 teams and 150,000 athletes globally, including more than 4,000 college teams, 28 in the NFL, 12 in the NBA, 15 in MLB and more. It also works with military and public safety organizations worldwide.