Luka Modrić and SQ Capital Invest in Croatian Sports Startup Sportening

SQ Capital, a company managing investment funds, is already an established name among Croatian investors and the startup community. The latest success for one of the startups in their portfolio, Sportening, is the support provided by Luka Modrić through his investment in this rapidly growing application aimed at sports fans.

The whole story began back in 2020 when the SQ Capital team met Ivan Klarić, the founder of the successful project ScoreAlarm and an investor in numerous startups and fellow entrepreneurs. Even during their first meeting, Ivan mentioned a new project he was developing, and SQC’s experienced team sensed success at that time. When six months later Ivan presented Sportening, a new social network specialized in gathering sports fans into communities, allowing them to stay informed about sports news, share content, communicate, and generally have a greater role in the club they support, as well as numerous other activities that will attract every fan, SQC supported him with an investment.

– One of the crucial things that was extremely important to us was that Sportening was set up from the beginning for extremely rapid scaling – in terms of company culture, team formation, and the roles of people within those teams, as well as responsibilities for achieving goals, and then in terms of product development based on analytics. Right from the start, they achieved that the team in Zagreb operates on principles used in the most successful companies of this type in the world – commented Janko Gabrić, partner and head of investments at SQ Capital.

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Janko Gabrić

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Sportening is an application in a relatively early stage of development, but given the aforementioned scalability, SQC firmly believes in its success, both in achieving the company’s goals and in its important role in strengthening Croatia’s position on the tech map of the world. That is why SQC had already made the decision to invest in the first round of external financing held at the beginning of 2021, the so-called ‘friends&family’ round.

– We are proud to be the only Croatian institutional investor in the first round intended for close individuals and associates – they emphasize from SQC.

In the following phases, in Sportening, Luka Modrić decided to invest, marking his first investment of this type, and his support for the domestic startup will certainly give additional momentum and encourage an increase in the number of users, especially considering that the application is currently primarily focused on the sport that enjoys the greatest popularity in the world – football.

One of the roles of the SQC team is to connect investors with startups, and the fact that recently in the group of investors alongside SQ Capital was Mate Rimac, who supported Codemap, a low code/no code platform, along with yesterday’s investment by Luka Modrić in Sportening, will certainly further expand the visibility of SQ Capital and deepen existing contacts while establishing new ones. In addition to Sportening and Codemap, SQC and its owners have previously invested in successful startups such as Repsly, Fueloyal, Farseer, or Mireta. In the future, SQ Capital plans to establish its own VC fund to further strengthen investments in the regional startup community.

The goal of SQC is, in addition to investments and networking, to support startups in the areas of finance, accounting, financial and tax law, and through a network of advisors consisting of the most successful Croatian founders with various skills and knowledge about the process that needs to be followed for a project to be successful, maximize every startup’s chance for success.