Arkero

Arkero is a Seattle-area company that sells AI software to professional sports organizations for the business and operational side of a club. Its platform sits on top of a club's existing systems - ticketing (Ticketmaster), commerce (Shopify), CRM and marketing tools (Salesforce, Customer IO), fan apps (Yinzcam), web and app analytics, data warehouses, Slack and email - and combines that structured data with unstructured material such as surveys and feedback, rep notes and emails, meeting transcripts, OneDrive documents, calendars and matchday planning spreadsheets, plus business context such as commercial goals, fan segments, playbooks and SOPs, and organizational structure. Arkero calls the result a "Club Intelligence Layer" over which AI agents operate.

On top of that layer the company offers a set of specialist agents: a RevOps agent that manages season-ticket renewals as a pipeline and flags members at risk of churn; a Match Operations agent that consolidates matchday plans scattered across documents, spreadsheets and Slack into a single plan of record; a Data Analyst agent that answers natural-language questions about ticketing metrics such as sales pacing, year-over-year comparisons, revenue trends and fixture performance without SQL or dashboards; and a Chief of Staff agent that captures decisions from meetings as institutional memory. Agents are accessible in Arkero's own interface as well as in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Claude and ChatGPT, and the company says more agents are in development.

Arkero describes its mission as helping sports businesses scale by automating repetitive work so staff can focus on strategy, arguing that clubs with large audiences and high valuations still run core business functions on outdated systems. Company-cited use cases include generating marketing campaign and promotional strategies; the CEO says Arkero can produce a club strategy in 15 to 30 minutes versus hours of manual brainstorming.

Founding story

Co-founder and CEO Shivaas Gulati took part in the 2024 acquisition of English club Southend United FC through a consortium and found that the club had no HR system or software for its business functions, with most of the business running on email and Excel and data siloed across separate platforms for ticketing, fan information and email. That frustration led him to launch Arkero in October 2025. The name references "arquero," Spanish for goalkeeper. Gulati recruited two former Remitly colleagues as co-founders: Vamsi Narla, who leads product and engineering, and Daniel Shi, who oversees business operations.

Business model

Arkero sells software to professional sports clubs and organizations, deploying an intelligence layer and AI agents on top of the customer's existing operational stack. Initial deployments focus on matchday planning and season-ticket renewals, and the company works with clubs as partners on early implementations.

Traction

Four early club partners across three professional soccer leagues: Seattle Sounders FC, Seattle Reign FC, San Diego FC and Bolton Wanderers FC. Following early prototype deployments, the Sounders and Reign project more than a 50% improvement in matchday planning efficiency for the 2026 season. The company had four employees at the time of its January 2026 funding announcement and planned to add five more during the year; Gulati cited significant inbound interest from teams.

Latest developments

In January 2026 Arkero announced a pre-seed round of more than $6 million led by Game Changers Ventures, with 776, BoxGroup, Garuda Ventures, Founders' Co-op and strategic investors including Adrian Hanauer participating, and simultaneously disclosed partnerships with the Seattle Sounders, Seattle Reign, San Diego FC and Bolton Wanderers. Proceeds are earmarked for platform investment, deeper team partnerships and hiring. Arkero was subsequently featured in SportsPro's March 2026 class of 20 sports tech startups to watch, and its co-founders discussed the company publicly in February and May 2026 media appearances.