Felix goes all-in: Our investment in Omada
Felix Capital leads Omada’s $7.6M seed round to build the ultimate sports app for Gen Z
We are thrilled to announce our investment in Omada, the premier sports game tailored for Gen Z worldwide, leading their $7.6M seed round. Omada’s vision is to become the defining sports and lifestyle brand for Gen Z, resonating across diverse sports sectors and audiences globally. Today, Omada boasts over 300,000 monthly players in France and a global player base exceeding 1 million, largely driven by enthusiasts from the UK and USA.
We are joining our friends at 20VC, Play Ventures, F4, Motier Ventures, and Athletico Ventures as investors in Omada. We are also excited to welcome an accomplished group of angel investors, including Xavier Niel, Akin Babayigit (founder of Tripledot Studios), Pierre Antoine Capton (founder of Mediawan), Claire Valoti (formerly EMEA VP at Snap), Maria Raga (formerly CEO of Depop), Iris Alameddine & Amine “PRIME” Mekri (Grandeur Company), Pareto Holdings, Paul Le (founder of La Belle Vie), Pat Cummins (captain of the Australian Cricket team), Francescu Santoni (CEO of Mojo.video) and the family office of french football legend Youri Djorkaeff.
Omada is a Bordeaux-based mobile app company building a crossover between a social network and a sports gaming app, where players place predictions on the major sports events of the day and engage with a community of fans through live events (online and offline), group chats and squads. Players don’t compete on Omada to get rich. Instead, they play with the aim to make it to the top of their leaderboards, become the best expert among their community of friends and engage with other sports fans. Omada currently covers football, basketball (NBA), tennis, baseball (in Japan), NHL, NFL and Formula One racing, and plans to quickly expand to more categories like Cricket and US College Basketball.
Omada distinguishes itself by an extraordinary long term retention (>25% D30, globally), customer love (as seen on social media, app store reviews and Discord channels), and engagement patterns, across all geographies and audiences, that we have rarely seen before.
Behind Omada’s inception is Adrien Miniatti, a repeat entrepreneur who earlier established Luni in 2019 — a successful, self-funded app developer, notably responsible for the chart topping Fitness Coach app. Before Luni, Adrien created Green Panda, a mobile gaming studio acquired by Ubisoft in 2018.
In October 2022, when we discovered Omada, it was not only leading the app store charts in France but also making successful debuts in Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US, yet it was an emerging and promising project under the Luni umbrella. Recognising its success and worldwide potential, Adrien initiated a spin-out in May 2023. This shift allowed him and the core Omada team to concentrate solely on Omada, leading to Felix leading the Seed financing by August 2023. It took months to convince Adrien to take external financing for the first time since he started his entrepreneurial journey and we are thrilled he chose Felix Capital for that.
Over the past decade, the boundaries among sports, gaming, and entertainment have seamlessly converged. Across the globe, youngsters are no longer just rallying behind their local squads; they’re absorbed in the Champions’ League, catching NBA’s highlights and speculating on the next Formula One champion. As we have all noticed during the summer, from Miami to Riyadh, through Madrid and Munich, the pulse of football fans now resonates globally. The emergence of alternative leagues like Spain’s Kings League, the US’s Overtime, or Germany’s Ballers League underscores a shifting paradigm: sports enthusiasts yearn for diverse interactions with sports and an ever-expanding global fan base. Sports video games, like FIFA or Madden have become significant cultural touch points. As technology and cultural tastes evolve, these industries continue to intertwine, creating new opportunities for innovation and audience engagement.
Omada has many characteristics of the types of companies we aim to back at Felix — a highly skilled and passionate founder, a management team with solid track records; a superpower ability to drive engagement through content and community; a high quality and retentive product; a sustainable business model and an opportunity in a large and growing market.
We see the potential for Omada to reach a global audience in sports and gaming, especially as sports is increasingly at the heart of popular culture and we are thrilled to partner with the founders and this fantastic group of co-investors.
