2025 EOY

We saw 26 events, 426 players, 12 sponsors, and a partridge in a pear tree!!

AuthorAuthor

Mivin Mathew & Mark Zmarzly
December 03, 2025

Strap in Ballers.

Ho, ho, ho…ly cow we balled a lot in 2026!

As the end of the year approaches, it’s a great chance to take stock over what we’ve accomplished and here are the numbers:

23 pick up runs, plus…

3 tournaments, including our biggest ever in May for 120+ Players, and held in….

5 different cities, for….

426 founder, investor, techies, and startup ecosystem peeps, and thanks to….

12 different sponsors for court costs, food/drink, tournament jerseys!

There was not ONE MONTH where we didn’t host a session and Sept was our biggest month with 4 runs in 3 cities…so we didn’t peak until after halftime and are bringing it home into the 4th quarter!

Amongst those numbers, we grew our flagship Sydney Tournament from 70 players in 2024 to 120 this year and hosted 2 mini tourneys in Melbs to raise $500+ for The Worlds Greatest Shave and another in Brisbane to coincide with Something Fest.

None of this would be possible without our small volunteer crew and so many die hard ballers who are keen to network and connect in new ways! And connect we do…with at least one capital raise in our network and another 7 figure signed deal tied to bball. 🙂 

Looking ahead, we’re exploring an Investor focused mini tourney in Q1 (they are tired of losing to founders…I kid!) and talking to sponsors now and we are still looking at the “submit your own team” tourney so fill in this Expression of Interest form ASAP to let us know if you’re interested in submitted a team of your own for “Fun, Networking, & Team Building” or for a “Competitive Bracket to Crown Kings/Queens of the Court.”

Thanks to you all for 2025 and we’ll see you soon in 2026! Until then, I hope you get a Wilson EVO NXT Bball for the holidays. Z

As always, below is what you’ll find in this newsletter.

  • Info on our upcoming Events + Hoop Runs

  • SportsTech and Ecosystem Updates

  • Community Wins + Movement

See you on the court.

❤️‍🔥🔈️COMMUNITY SHOUTS 🔈️❤️‍🔥 

BALLER SPOTLIGHT

Thought we play mainly in Australia, we’re always on the look out for Startup Ballers across the globe so are highlighting Frank Denbow aka the G.O.A.T. of NYC and his startup Ballers.

Frank and I (Z) connected on LinkedIn after seeing a mutual connection’s post about basketball. I’m a big believer in connecting on LinkedIn when there are several connection points (bball, startups, common connection), and it turn out that the computer vision tech lead on Ballers is from the same state in the US as me (Nebraska). Thought Frank and I hadn’t met yet, I saw a former sports tech founder friend who is now a professional sports agent was in NYC and working with the NBA so I tagged Frank into the post…and lookie who got invited to NBA HQ!!!


Check out Ballers and even watch Jason Calacanis break down Ballers (RealBallers.com) pitch deck here.

VINYL SPOTLIGHT ⚡️ 

Shout out to Sydney Ballers Trent McLaren of Vinyl and Kieran O’Neill of Tidal Ventures for the ultimate $2 Million Dollar Alley-Opp by coming together! Read more here.

Sydney Baller Shyeon and his cofounders Harrison and Long have been recognised in the Forbes Australia 30 under 30 Technology category for their work with Puralink, following their first year of being fulltime with the business of saving Australia’s pipes.

Check out their post on LinkedIn,
And more on Forbes here.


Q: What Do Poker and Bball Have in Common? ⁉️ 

A: You Can Lose Your Shorts in Both if You’re Not Careful.

Rayn Ong is known for his ability to mint unicorns and drive the lane but did you also know he takes money from founders? 🙂 I’m kidding…if you’ve read this far then you’ve founder our coveted Easter Egg!

Rayn and Z are hosting a Sydney Startup Poker Night on Jan 28 and we have 1 slot for a startup baller be that a founder or investor or other. Read more about the FOMO build up here and ping Z on LinkedIn if you’d like to be considered for one of the limited slots.

The comment about taking your money is a joke as it’s small stakes and mainly for fun. Or so Rayn keeps assuring me….hmmm. 🤷‍♂️ 

Open Role for Digital Media + Sales Folks

Check this out open Account Executive APAC role at Scoreplay, a company whose services are used by the Sacremento Kings, MLS and Borussia Dortmund.

🦄 SPORTSTECH NEWS 🦄

IBM launches Sports Tech Startup Challenge

A joint proposal from IBM and Web Summit to find the best in sportstech, enable further partnerships in the IBM portfolio, and stay at the forefront of innovation across athlete performance, fan engagement and more.

Fastbreak.ai raising 40M

A sportstech startup specialising in sports scheduling optimisation, and has been involved with the NBA since 2023.
They’ve also partnered with giants like Amazon, IBM and Google.

Sportstech in a nutshell

Theres been around 25.3k sportstech startups, with around 13.6% funded adding up to a total of 33.3B in VC and PE money, and resulting in 23 unicorns.

Read more in this linked Tracxn article that goes deep

NBA addresses an injury problem

To enable long term player sustainability, the NBA is utilising biomechanical testing through sensor technology, motion capture and force plate analyses to identify players predisposed to injuries through 4 rounds of testing during the 25 -26 season.
League officials believe the schedules, timezones and increased pace of play play a big part and proactive support is neccassary.

Read more in this linked Opencourt article

AWS + NBA = Data Driven Basketball.

Every year the NBA generates ~2.5 petabytes of data across 1230 games.
With the power of AWS, not only can this data house scale to 10 petabytes, but the insights gained can change the game for teams, players and fans alike.
Some of the highlights are the “Gravity” algorithm, “Defensive Box Score” and “Shot Difficulty.

Whats exciting is that this can not only pave the way for sports enhancement, but also with any sector that produces and handles high-volume data streams.

Need to up your game?

Check out homecourt.ai - an app that lets you learn from the best, and an official partner of the NBA.

With homecourt.ai and an iPhone, you can level up anywhere.
Not a sponsored post, just a cool app anyone can use to make every shot count.

⛹️‍♂️ PAST AND UPCOMING EVENTS ⛹️‍♀️ 

More of the good stuff.

If you miss out this time - you’ll always find the next event in your inbox and through this newsletter…though we’ve noticed less and less signups when using the Lu.ma invite function so may resort to direct emails in future if the trend continues.

Try adding [email protected] to your contacts to help make sure you get the invites.

UPCOMING: 

BRIS CHRISSY RUN 🏀 DEC 3 at 3:30pm @ QUT: https://luma.com/uthtepat with our friends at Just Digital People Sponsoring!
 

RECAP ON RECENT RUNS:

Was great to have Don Mander host another stealler Gold Coast run, this time at the beautiful site of the 2018 Commonwealth games and in conjunction with Invest Fest. Read/Watch More Here.

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