On July 8, Hudl acquired TeamUp, a company out of Fargo, North Dakota, and rebranded it Hudl Fundraising. The buyer wouldn't say what it paid, and it was the nineteenth acquisition Hudl has made since 2006, so on the surface this reads like routine shopping from a business that films high school games and sells coaches the software to break down the tape.
The price is a small story. The money Hudl now stands next to is a much bigger one.
TeamUp does one thing: it helps a school team raise money. That makes it a different kind of product from the film, scheduling, and roster subscriptions Hudl sells, because a fundraising tool earns from the money a school brings in rather than from a flat fee the school pays out. And it moves Hudl a step closer to the part of an athletic department that controls the checkbook.
What a "Gamified Fundraiser" Actually Is
Strip the jargon and TeamUp is a digital replacement for the door-to-door sales drive. Instead of kids walking the neighborhood with a catalog of wrapping paper or cookie dough, each athlete gets a personal page, texts and emails it to family and friends, and the donations come in online. The "gamified" part is a live leaderboard: players watch who has raised the most and race to climb it, the same hook that makes a fitness app work, pointed at a booster drive.
Programs can run it two ways, according to founder Mark Teckenburg, whose team built TeamUp in 2024: a self-led campaign the coach manages, or a single one-hour event where Hudl handles the logistics and the players just show up and compete.
Hudl's announcement includes one telling number. High school teams using TeamUp have averaged more than $8,000 per event, measured across events run in the two years ending July 1, 2026 (Hudl notes results aren't guaranteed and vary by program size and sport). In this kind of fundraising the provider's income is a slice of that gross rather than a flat license, so the bigger those events get, the more the fundraiser is worth to Hudl.
Here is how Hudl CEO David Graff framed the purchase:
"Traditional athletic fundraising is a massive burden on athletes, parents and booster clubs. Coaches want to focus on coaching. Athletes want to focus on competing. By bringing TeamUp's modern, proven fundraising approach into the Hudl ecosystem, we're giving valuable time back to everyone involved and letting organizations focus on the game."
David Graff, CEO of Hudl
Selling Software Versus Sitting on the Money
Most of what Hudl sells is software a school pays for: a subscription for video and analysis, another for scheduling, another for registration and team messaging. Steady, predictable, priced per team. Fundraising works the other way around. The clearest read on the money comes from the company Hudl now competes with head-on: Snap! Raise tells programs they keep 80% or more of what they raise, which means the provider's own take comes out of the donations rather than a separate bill.
Hudl hasn't disclosed TeamUp's pricing, so the exact split is unknown. But the way the model works is clear enough. Sell a school one more film subscription and you earn one more subscription. Help a school raise more money and you earn more, every time, without signing a new customer.
That is also why the product Hudl chose matters more than the fact of the purchase. Ticketing, which Hudl already runs, only reaches the fans who show up at the gate, while a fundraiser pulls from every athlete's family and friends, the widest pool of money a school program can tap. Owning the software a school runs on is a good business, but earning a piece of the money flowing through that school is a better one.
Why This Fits Hudl, and Where the Market Is Going
Hudl isn't a startup taking a flyer. Founded in Lincoln, Nebraska in 2006, it took a growth investment from the private equity firm Bain Capital in 2020 and has spent the years since turning a game-film company into one that touches nearly everything around a season: capture, analysis, streaming, ticketing, scheduling, communication, and now the fundraiser. Nineteen deals got it there.
The direction under all of it matters for anyone tracking youth-sports software. The money in youth sports keeps climbing, families now spend an average of $1,016 on a single child's main sport, up 46% in five years, and programs feel every dollar of that pressure. The companies winning this market are shifting from charging schools for tools toward taking a small piece of the money already moving through them: ticket sales, registration fees, and now donations. That shift shows up again in the next deal, and it matters more than this one's undisclosed price.
Where the Model Gets Harder
The bet carries risk, and most of it sits in the product itself rather than the price Hudl paid.
Fundraising is crowded and seasonal. Snap! Raise and a long list of competitors already sell into the same schools, and plenty of programs still run their fundraisers the old way, on a sign-up sheet and a volunteer's spare weekends. Being one more option inside a bigger software suite doesn't guarantee a coach makes the switch.
The percentage model is also the thing families see. When the fee comes out of donated dollars rather than a separate invoice, parents can tell, and a cut that shows up on every gift can wear on the same families a program leans on season after season.
Then there is the machinery underneath. Collecting donations means handling payments and donor information, and inside a school it means student data, a heavier compliance load than reviewing game tape ever carried. The college side, which TeamUp also serves, carries even more of that weight. None of this sinks the deal, but it does mean the integration has to be handled with care rather than treated as finished the day it's announced.
Takeaways for Investors
Hudl Moved From Billing Schools to Sharing Their Upside
Every other product in Hudl's suite earns a subscription no matter how a team does. Fundraising ties Hudl's revenue to how much a program raises, income that grows with the size of the fundraiser instead of the number of customers.
Bundling Decides Whether the Deal Pays Off
The purchase pays off if Hudl packages fundraising with the scheduling, registration, and ticketing tools schools already run, so raising money becomes one more tab directors open every day. Left as a separate login, it stays a modest add-on.
The Prize Is the Booster Club and the Athletic Director
Fundraising sits Hudl with whoever controls a program's budget rather than only the coach who breaks down film, and that relationship is harder for a school to leave than any single software line item.
The Pattern Matters More Than the Price
Paying to sit on donated dollars is the same move as taking a piece of ticket sales and registration fees. The youth-sports software winners are trading tool subscriptions for a slice of the cash already flowing through programs, and that is the shift to track in the next deal.
