Andrew Smith, ClearBank founder and former CTO, has launched his next venture, Sporta. Its first Crowdcube funding round values the startup at £35 million pre-money.
Sporta intends to provide banking services to active sports participants, clubs and communities. The startup sizes its audience in the UK at some 43 million sports participants, with an £80 billion annual wallet share for financial services.
Smith takes on the role of CEO, making the most of his experience in building both ClearBank, the UK’s first new clearing bank in 250 years, and RTGS Global. Co-founders, Paul Fraser (COO) and Vicky Gosling OBE, add expertise in banking, operations and risk management, and global sports administration, respectively.
The current funding round, via Crowdcube in the UK, values the startup at a pre-money valuation of £35 million and aims to raise a further £5 million follow on seed capital.
Lead investor, family office Lazaroo-Hood, has topped up a previous investment of £2.5 million, with a further £5 million Series A commitment.
While open to any qualifying retail investor, the CrowdCube element of the seed round is specifically motivated by giving grassroots sporting participants, players and fans, in clubs and communities access to participate in Sporta.
Smith is currently tight-lipped about his choice of technology platforms and partners. Announcements are upcoming shortly.
Inevitably the new bank has AI at its core. According to Smith: “Our bank is essentially all AI, so all our workflows, processes, scoring algorithms, support… everything, is to be handled by our own AI.”
“We are working with market leading providers - across our core banking platform, card processing, issuing and such.. However, we have our own technology stack that brings this all together. Work has started on that already.”
Sporta has already built its own IP to enable their central concept: to let customers design their own banking. For Sporta this means the customer gets to create financial products for their exact needs, behaviours and usage.
What is described as a hyper-personalised agentic AI tool, SPORTA PT, helps the customer to get this done so they are not caught up in the complexity of programming the products themselves.
The seed round currently underway on CrowdCube until November 26th, will form part of Sporta’s second seed round. This is planned to fund Sporta’s technology and operational build out, alongside a UK banking licence application process through to the achievement of Authorisation with Restrictions status targeted for Q3 2026.