Facility Ally, a sports facility and “eatertainment” management software company, has closed a $700,000 pre-seed funding round led by Slabotsky Family Office. The funds are expected to be used to build out Facility Ally’s development, sales and marketing teams.
For sports facilities and leagues, Facility Ally provides a central hub for reservations, memberships, payment, waivers and more, said Luke Wade, founder of the Kansas City-based startup. It helps streamline operations and prevent double bookings while enabling facilities and leagues to grow. With about 100,000 sports facilities in the U.S., Wade added, leagues, tournaments and facilities are a $70 billion industry.
Facility Ally clients include Kansas City’s Hy-Vee Arena, which uses the software to manage its dozen courts and numerous other sports and training facilities, said Luke Wade. Steve Foutch, CEO of Foutch Brothers and owner of Hy-Vee Arena, previously invested in Facility Ally and advised on creation of the software.
“Almost every facility out there uses four to eight different software programs to manage their facilities — one for leagues, one for calendars; lessons, coaches, camps, clinics,” he explained. “We’ve already seen tremendous demand for an all-in-one software solution for facility and league management. This funding will allow us to rapidly grow our user base across the U.S.”
“I’ve seen how quickly groundbreaking softwares can scale,” added Noah Slabotsky, of Slabotsky Family Office, which has successfully launched multiple software startups. “If the market is ready for it and the product is right, you can save people money and make their lives easier. Facility Ally has everything it takes to scale and we’re thrilled to have partnered with Luke to make that happen.”
Wade initially conceived of and developed Facility Ally to manage his own adult recreational sports business, KC Crew, which currently has 20,000 participants across basketball, golf, pickleball, cornhole, volleyball, shuffleboard, futsal, softball, kickball, karaoke and e-sports leagues. He left a position as a full-time developer to create the initial version of the Facility Ally software himself and grow KC Crew.
After struggling to find a development team to expand and refine his product, Wade leveraged tech enabled services company Full Scale to provide the programming talent needed to create a comprehensive software-as-a-service product for sports facilities and leagues, he said. Full Scale also invested in Facility Ally in 2018.
Chicken N Pickle, a rapidly growing pickleball eatertainment destination which currently operates seven locations in four states with five more in development, uses Facility Ally to manage their pickleball leagues, said Luke Wade. As pickleball continues to explode in popularity throughout the country, Facility Ally frequently receives in-bound inquiries from new facilities in need of their product.
