When their own kids started playing sports, Jonas Persson and Daniel Franck kept hitting the same wall: if they could not get to a game, there was no way to watch it. The company they built to fix that, Sportway, now installs automated cameras that film, produce, and stream games with nobody on the sideline running them. Franck told Tech.eu the idea started exactly that simply. Today the Stockholm company runs more than 2,200 of those cameras across more than 20 countries, works with over 70 sports federations and leagues (the bodies that run a sport in a country or region), and produces more than 250,000 live events a year, nearly all of them the youth, amateur, and lower-league games that television never carries. In late June it raised about SEK 200 million, roughly €20 million, at a valuation near SEK 1 billion, close to $100 million.
Twenty million euros is a rounding error next to the checks that move around professional sports. What makes this one worth a closer look is who wrote it and what it says about where youth-sports money is heading next. The round was led by Gamma Waves, a firm that invests only in sports and was founded by names from the top of the European game, among them former Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli and former Italy captain Giorgio Chiellini. It also arrives at a moment when the freshest money in youth sports has started flowing to the companies that film and sell the games, on top of the teams, facilities, and clubs that have drawn most of it so far.
From a Camera to the Whole Broadcast
Sportway started with the camera, and while the camera is still the part people picture first, it is the least of what the company sells now. A federation that signs on gets the whole chain: the automated capture, the software that turns raw footage into a watchable broadcast, the streaming service it plays on, and the tools to charge fans through subscriptions or single-game passes. For families who could never make it to a match, and for small clubs that could never afford a camera crew, it means professional-looking coverage of games that used to go unseen. Daniel Franck, who co-founded the company in 2017, has been candid about where the difficulty lies. Installing one automated camera in a single gym is straightforward. Coordinating hundreds of venues at once and producing hundreds of thousands of matches a year without a crew at any of them is the problem Sportway spent years solving, and it likely explains why a federation would rather hand the whole job over than build it alone. Its longest-standing partners include the Swedish and Finnish ice hockey federations, which run two of Europe's busiest federation-owned streaming services on its technology; newer clients include the Royal Dutch Hockey Association and Norway's tennis and padel federation.
Where the Money Is Turning
For years, the money pouring into youth sports went into things you could stand in or cheer for: club teams, tournament operators, and the facilities that host them. The U.S. market alone runs an estimated $40 billion a year and is growing 8 to 10 percent, by the law firm White & Case's reckoning. The newer pattern is where the freshest dollars land. Luca Blasi, who runs private-markets valuations at S&P Global Market Intelligence, has said recent deals aim less at owning clubs and more at "the infrastructure behind youth sports," the technology, data, and media-rights businesses underneath the games. By S&P's count, U.S. private-equity money in the space reached $2.59 billion across 17 deals between January 2025 and May 2026. The same appetite shows up in bigger checks: Teamworks, which sells software to top sports organizations, pulled in a $285 million round in 2025.
Why that infrastructure is suddenly worth owning starts with the households. The average American family spent $1,016 on one child's primary sport in 2024, up 46 percent in five years and roughly twice the rate of inflation, according to the Aspen Institute's Project Play. Even as the share of children playing has slipped a little, spending per child has climbed, which suggests the money riding on each game is rising and the attention around it is too. Sportway reads as a clean European example of the shift Blasi describes. Its value sits in the capture-to-sale chain for games that were never on anyone's broadcast schedule.
The Acquisitions Behind the Round
The round did not come out of nowhere. Since early 2025, Sportway has been buying the pieces of the broadcast it did not already own. In March it launched a UK arm and acquired NextGenXV, a British producer of school and grassroots sports coverage. In October it added two more: Sportall, a Paris company that builds direct-to-consumer streaming apps for clients like the FIA World Endurance Championship and France's indoor football league, and Eyecons, a Dutch streaming service that carries everything from third-tier football to volleyball and water polo. This April it bought Studio Automated, a Dutch maker of AI broadcasting software, alongside the systems integrator Broadcast Solutions.
Each deal filled in a link: coverage in new markets, direct-to-consumer distribution, and the software to run automated broadcasts at higher quality. Taken together, they let a single federation hand off its entire game-day operation, from the camera to the checkout, to one company. The new money, Sportway says, will go toward international expansion, product work, and more acquisitions. Gamma Waves fits that ambition. It describes itself as a permanent-capital investor focused on sports intellectual property and sports technology, founded by Agnelli, Chiellini, and the businessman Rocco Benetton. Permanent capital is built to hold rather than flip, which suits a business whose value builds slowly, through federation contracts that run for years.
Takeaways for Investors
Infrastructure Is the New Target
The clubs and facilities that play the games have drawn most of the capital so far. The companies that capture, stream, and sell those games are where a growing share of the newest money is going, and Sportway is one of the clearest examples in Europe.
Federation Deals Are the Durable Asset
Sportway's value rests on multi-year contracts with national federations, the Swedish and Finnish hockey bodies among them. Those relationships recur and are hard to unseat, so the operators worth watching are the ones locking in federation contracts.
Expect More Acquisitions
Four purchases since early 2025 show a company growing by buying, and a fresh round usually funds more of it. Watch for further deals in streaming, data, and the scheduling software federations already run on.
Permanent Capital Points to a Long Hold
Gamma Waves is the kind of investor built for long holds. That patience fits a business whose returns build over years of federation relationships, and it hints at a longer timeline than a typical growth round.
