Tonsser, the Copenhagen-based startup that offers a vertical social network aimed at youth soccer players who want to build their own online profile and potentially get discovered by a bigger club, continues to grow at a clip, both in terms of signups but also the influence it wants to have on the beautiful game. The company has signed on Nike as its first brand channel partner, and now has 380,000 youth players registered, up from 100,000 just over a year ago.
The Danish startup has also raised a new round of funding as it gears up for a 2018 expansion to the U.K., home to the English Premier League and a huge potential youth football market for the startup. It is also quite a fragmented one, in terms of youth leagues, so it will be interesting to see how quickly Tonsser can grow here. The app is currently live in France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
In a call with co-founder and CEO Peter Holm (and after we spent the first ten minutes catching up with the latest Tottenham Hotspur news, as we are inclined to do), he told me that Tonsser is evolving from a social app that was mainly about youth players making a profile of themselves and tracking scores and stats in order…