An Israeli sports-tech company that started life as an analytics side project for an Arsenal supporters' community has just landed one of the more eye-catching funding rounds of the summer for the industry. Marquee, which builds an AI platform that pulls together the scattered data professional clubs already hold and turns it into usable decisions, has raised $6.5 million, ONE reported, in a round led by the German media giant Axel Springer SE.
Joining Axel Springer in the round are Welltech Ventures, Apex Capital, AnD Ventures, 97212 Ventures and JCP, according to the funding announcement corroborated by Yahoo Finance and a GlobeNewswire press release. The company says the fresh capital will go toward accelerating product development, expanding its AI, engineering and data science teams, and opening its first commercial offices in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Marquee's pitch is that clubs are not short of data - they are short of a way to use it. The platform does not collect new information so much as stitch together what a club already has in separate systems, from scouting and performance metrics to medical and financial records, and surface insights within seconds rather than the weeks a manual review might take.
CEO and co-founder Dean Bracha (דין ברכה) built the company alongside chief technology officer Jonathan Hazut (יונתן חזות), chief operating officer Dror Rosenfeld (דרור רוזנפלד) and chief data officer Tal Darchi (טל דרחי). Bracha has said most sports organizations use only somewhere between 4% and 15% of the data they already possess - the gap Marquee is trying to close.
The product's roots are unusually specific: the founding team first built its recruitment and analytics tools for an online Arsenal fan community, work that later caught the attention of professional club staff and pushed the founders toward building for the industry itself.
That pivot has moved quickly. Marquee is now live with more than 20 professional clubs and federations across multiple countries, including Tier 1 clubs in the Premier League and Serie A as well as Major League Soccer organizations, alongside clients in Israel. The company currently employs around 15 people.
Steven Berelowitz, a partner at Welltech Ventures, framed the investment as a bet on Marquee's position rather than just its growth. "Marquee stood out because they are applying AI to one of the most complex, data-rich environments in professional sports," he said, adding that the firm sees the company positioned to define how AI is used across the sport.
The new money is earmarked in part for expansion beyond football. Marquee plans to roll out dedicated basketball and American football products later in 2026, with early conversations already under way with NBA and EuroLeague teams as it looks to replicate its football traction in other sports.
This is not Marquee's first outside backing. Earlier in 2026 the company closed a smaller pre-seed round whose investors included Wix co-founders Avishai Abrahami and Omer Shai and 365Scores founder Ami Sirkis - a roster that signalled early confidence from Israel's tech and sports-media establishment well before Axel Springer's involvement.
