Former Disney Exec Ben Sherwood Sells Youth Sports Tech Startup Mojo to Software Firm In Bid to Scale Up

Mojo, the youth sports technology company founded by former Disney TV chief Ben Sherwood, has been acquired by the youth sports software firm TeamSnap.

Mojo was “inspired by kind of the Disney mantra of wanting to surprise and delight families exceed their expectations and most of all, help them make memories to last a lifetime,” Sherwood tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Sherwood — who will be a board member of TeamSnap — tells THR that he hopes to leverage his connections in the media space to continue growing the business.

“I think that with my background in media and technology, my relationships with the Walt Disney Company and across media, I think that part of what’s exciting when you get to the kind of scale of TeamSnap where they have more than four million monthly active users, you start looking at the opportunity to start doing interesting things at that level with media partners,” Sherwood says. “Four million monthly active users is a meaningful number of users in the media context, Mojo has been subscale, we’ve been small. But now with this kind of distribution, this kind of partnership, we’re suddenly at a scale where we can start doing some pretty exciting things with all kinds of partners across the media landscape, where I come from.”

He framed the acquisition as one that would complement TeamSnap’s current business to business (B2B) structure. The company has 25 million registered users and 2 million daily active users playing more than 100 sports, with 19,000 sports organizations using TeamSnap’s services.

“The Mojo play is really a B2C move … in the business I was in, we’d call that DTC, direct to consumer. So that’s where Mojo comes in. We built a DTC subscription product in the parlance of Hollywood, the direct to consumer product, streaming service and other features that that are very appealing to them as they want to scale their business and drive more revenue.”

While Sherwood launched Mojo with the goal of helping parents to coach their kids, and pairing it with original content meant to help teach kids how to play the games, it has since evolved to include a fully-fledged subscription business that includes live and on-demand streaming of games, player profiles, and other features.

“Now you can stream games so that grandparents don’t miss a game or if you’ve got to be at work and your kid is playing you can watch your kid from work with a live stream of the game or you can also watch asynchronously so you can you can wait later,” Sherwood says. “We also created all these kind of automated highlights so that anytime your kid scores a goal or gets a base hit, you can clip it off, and share it with all your friends and family and your aunt and uncle back east.”

And it paired those services for teams and leagues with original content.

“We poured millions of dollars into premium content that we made with the professional leagues,” Sherwood says. “And then we poured a lot into technology that would be as good, as seamless as the kind of streaming that a customer is used to when they turn on their Netflix account or when they turn on their ESPN+ account. That’s who we consider our competitive set.”

Sherwood notes that he coached his son’s first soccer team (the Rattlesnakes) using TeamSnap. 13 Years later, and his son is a division 1 college soccer player, and Mojo is owned by the company that helped start it all.