Anvara

Cover Block

Field	Value
Name	Anvara
Tagline	AI-powered marketplace connecting brands and rights holders for sponsorships in sports, events, and experiences
Headquarters	New York, United States
Stage	Seed
Business Model	Marketplace
Industry	Media / Entertainment
Technology	AI / Machine Learning
Geography	North America
Growth Profile	Venture Scale
Founding Team	Co-Founders (2): Andrei Stenmark, Nick Khalili
Funding Label	Seed
Total Disclosed	~$3.1M [Sports Business Journal, Jan 2026]

Links

• Website: https://www.anvara.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/anvara
• Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/anvara

Summary and Signal

Anvara is a private, AI-assisted marketplace that brokers sponsorship deals between brands and rights holders across college sports, music festivals, and live experiences. It warrants attention because it sits in one of the last major advertising categories still transacted largely through email, spreadsheets, and personal Rolodexes [Anvara, retrieved 2026] [Digiday, retrieved 2026]. The company was founded by two University of Southern California graduates, Andrei Stenmark and Nick Khalili, who met in college and built the platform to address opaque inventory and slow deal cycles in real-world advertising [Digiday, retrieved 2026] [LinkedIn, retrieved 2026]. The product positions itself as an "operating system for sponsorship deals," handling discovery, offers, contracts, payments, creative exchange, and post-campaign measurement in a single workflow [Anvara, retrieved 2026]. Early customer references include the social app BeReal, which used Anvara to activate across college sports inventory in late 2025 [PR Newswire, retrieved 2026]. In January 2026, Anvara closed a $3.1 million seed round led by Roger Ehrenberg's shift Ventures, with participation from Tom Ricketts' Marquee Ventures, the athlete consortium Sequel, Bryan Rosenblatt, James Robinson, and Dorm Room Fund [Sports Business Journal, Jan 2026] [PitchBook, retrieved 2026]. Over the next 12 to 18 months the questions worth tracking are whether Anvara can convert pilot brands into recurring enterprise spend, whether its AI-driven matching and ROI prediction layer demonstrates measurable lift over manual brokerage, and whether it can sign enough rights-holder inventory to make the marketplace two-sided at scale.

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Sports Business Journal, Crunchbase, PitchBook, PR Newswire, and Digiday.

Taxonomy Snapshot

Axis	Value
Stage	Seed
Business Model	Marketplace (success-based fees on rights-holder side)
Industry / Vertical	Media / Entertainment, Sponsorship & Sports Marketing
Technology Type	AI / Machine Learning (matching, ROI prediction)
Geography	North America (HQ New York)
Growth Profile	Venture Scale
Founding Team	Co-Founders (2), USC alumni
Funding	~$3.1M disclosed across seed [Sports Business Journal, Jan 2026]

Company Overview

Anvara was built to address a structural inefficiency in sponsorship sales: most deals between brands and rights holders, whether a college athletic department, a festival promoter, or an esports team, are still negotiated one-to-one through introductions and decks. According to Digiday, co-founders Andrei Stenmark and Nick Khalili met as students at the University of Southern California and started Anvara with the goal of making real-world ad inventory discoverable and transactable in a way more familiar to digital media buyers [Digiday, retrieved 2026] [LinkedIn, retrieved 2026]. The company is headquartered in New York and operates a private marketplace, meaning brands and rights holders are vetted before being matched rather than openly listed [Anvara, retrieved 2026].

The public milestone trail is short but coherent. PR Newswire announced the launch of Anvara's real-world ad marketplace for brands and agencies, positioning the platform around discovery, contracting, and measurement in one place [PR Newswire, retrieved 2026]. In September 2025, BeReal disclosed it had used Anvara to run an in-stadium activation across college sports [WV News, Sep 2025] [PR Newswire, retrieved 2026]. On January 14, 2026, Sports Business Journal reported Anvara had closed a $3.1 million seed round led by shift Ventures, with Marquee Ventures, Sequel, Bryan Rosenblatt, James Robinson, and Dorm Room Fund participating [Sports Business Journal, Jan 2026]. Crunchbase records also reference an earlier pre-seed round dated July 2024 [Crunchbase, retrieved 2026].

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Sports Business Journal, Crunchbase, PR Newswire, and Digiday.

The Product and the Stack

Anvara markets itself as the "operating system for sponsorship deals" [Anvara, retrieved 2026]. The platform spans the full deal lifecycle: discovery and matching of brands to rights-holder inventory, offer and contract workflows, payments, creative file exchange, and post-campaign performance tracking [Anvara, retrieved 2026]. On the brand side, the company describes AI-powered matching and ROI predictions intended to help marketers evaluate sponsorship opportunities against expected reach and engagement before committing budget [Anvara, retrieved 2026]. On the rights-holder side, listings are free with success-based fees taken on completed transactions, and sellers retain control over which brands can see their inventory [Anvara, retrieved 2026].

The customer-facing product is segmented into three audiences: brands, rights holders, and agencies. The agency tier is described as a white-label offering with client dashboards and shared workflows [Anvara, retrieved 2026]. Pricing is tiered from a free entry point up to a "white glove" plan that adds forecasting, analytics, and managed support [Anvara, retrieved 2026]. The published case studies highlight BeReal alongside consumer brands Cerca and LOLA as activation references [Anvara, retrieved 2026].

John Wall Street has previewed the company moving toward programmatic sponsorship sales, which would imply automated bidding or rate-card mechanics layered on top of the current workflow tool [John Wall Street, retrieved 2026].

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Anvara product pages, John Wall Street, and PR Newswire.

Market Research and Opportunity

Sponsorship sits at the intersection of advertising, live entertainment, and athlete economics, and the buying process has lagged the digitization seen in programmatic display, search, and connected TV. Anvara is targeting that gap.

Digiday frames the relevant pool as the out-of-home and real-world advertising marketplace, a category that includes stadium signage, on-site activations, festival presence, and athlete-driven content, and characterizes it as fragmented and intermediated [Digiday, retrieved 2026]. Sports Business Journal's coverage of Anvara's seed round notes the participation of Roger Ehrenberg's shift Ventures and Tom Ricketts' Marquee Ventures, two firms whose thesis is built around the institutionalization of sports business workflows [Sports Business Journal, Jan 2026].

The demand drivers cited across the secondary coverage cluster around three forces. First, brand marketers, particularly those serving Gen Z audiences, are reallocating budget away from purely digital channels toward in-person and experiential touchpoints [Digiday, retrieved 2026]. Second, the loosening of NCAA name-image-likeness rules has created a wave of new sellable inventory in college athletics [PR Newswire, retrieved 2026]. Third, rights holders increasingly want measurement parity with digital channels, which favors platforms that bundle execution with attribution [Anvara, retrieved 2026].

Adjacent and substitute markets include traditional sports marketing agencies, sponsorship-data providers such as SponsorUnited, talent and influencer marketplaces such as OpenSponsorship, and direct-sold inventory through team and venue sales staff [G2, retrieved 2026].

Indicator	Value
Anvara seed round size	$3.1M
shift Ventures fund size	$100M
Confirmed reference brands	BeReal, Cerca, LOLA

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Multiple corroborating press references but no named third-party market sizing report.

The Competitive Field

Anvara competes against a small set of named software platforms and a much larger set of legacy intermediaries, and its positioning rests on owning the transaction rather than just the data layer.

Company	Positioning	Stage / Funding	Notable Differentiator
Anvara	AI-powered private marketplace, end-to-end deal workflow for sports, events, festivals	Seed, ~$3.1M	Combines discovery, contracting, payments, and measurement in one flow
SponsorUnited	Sponsorship intelligence and data platform across sports, entertainment, media	Later-stage	Depth of historical sponsorship dataset and brand-team relationship graph
OpenSponsorship	Marketplace connecting brands with athletes for endorsement and content deals	Earlier-stage	Athlete-centric inventory rather than property/venue inventory

The competitive map breaks into three layers. The intelligence layer, dominated by SponsorUnited, sells data and analytics on who is sponsoring whom but does not transact deals on platform [G2, retrieved 2026] [Anvara, retrieved 2026]. The marketplace layer, where Anvara and OpenSponsorship sit, attempts to close the gap between discovery and execution [G2, retrieved 2026]. The third layer is the legacy intermediary stack of agencies, team sales staff, and personal networks, which still controls the majority of disclosed deal flow.

Anvara's most defensible edge today is workflow ownership. By covering offers, contracts, payments, and post-campaign measurement, it captures the system of record for each deal, which produces a proprietary dataset on actual transacted prices and outcomes [Anvara, retrieved 2026]. The most exposed flank is enterprise distribution. SponsorUnited has years of relationships with brand sponsorship teams and league offices, and any agency holding company can build or acquire a competing workflow tool. Anvara's published agency white-label product is a defensive move, but it also concedes that agencies will remain a critical distribution channel [Anvara, retrieved 2026].

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Competitor identities confirmed by G2 and Anvara's own comparison page, but funding and revenue benchmarks for competitors are not independently sourced here.

Opportunity

The prize, if Anvara executes, is owning the transactional layer of a category that has historically been transacted off-platform.

The headline opportunity

The single largest outcome Anvara could plausibly become is the default operating system for mid-market sponsorship deals in North America. The platform already covers the full deal lifecycle from discovery through measurement [Anvara, retrieved 2026], a consumer brand (BeReal) has run a real campaign through it [PR Newswire, retrieved 2026], and the seed investor base is composed of operators who can open doors into teams, leagues, and venues [Sports Business Journal, Jan 2026]. Owning the transaction is the structurally most valuable position in any marketplace because it produces the data exhaust that all adjacent products eventually depend on.

Growth scenarios

Scenario	What happens	Catalyst	Why it's plausible
College athletics standard	Anvara becomes the default platform for NIL-era brand-to-program activations	A multi-conference or collective-wide rollout	Inventory is newly sellable post-NIL and BeReal has already activated through the platform
Agency embedded layer	Holding-company agencies adopt Anvara as their white-label sponsorship workflow	Signed agreement with a major agency network	The agency-tier white-label product is already shipped and investor Roger Ehrenberg has deep ties into ad-tech infrastructure
Programmatic sponsorship rails	Anvara extends from workflow into automated bidding and rate-carding	A standardized inventory taxonomy and enough closed-deal data	John Wall Street has reported the company is moving in this direction

What compounding looks like

The flywheel is straightforward. Each closed deal on Anvara produces structured data on what brands paid for what kind of inventory, with what creative, and against what measured outcome. That data improves the AI matching and ROI predictions, which makes the platform more useful to the next brand, which attracts more rights-holder inventory [Anvara, retrieved 2026]. The agency white-label tier is a distribution flywheel of its own: every agency that embeds Anvara brings its full client roster into the network at zero direct sales cost.

The size of the win

A useful comparable is the public sports-marketing data category, where SponsorUnited has scaled into a category-defining intelligence platform without owning the transaction. If Anvara becomes the transactional counterpart, the addressable revenue per deal is meaningfully higher than a data subscription. Vertical workflow-plus-payments companies in adjacent categories have historically commanded valuations in the multi-billion-dollar range when they reach durable take-rate at scale.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Headline opportunity grounded in confirmed product scope and customer references; scenario sizing is analogical, not a sourced forecast.

Sources

1. [Anvara, retrieved 2026] Anvara: Sponsorship Marketplace for Brands & Events | https://www.anvara.com/
2. [Anvara, retrieved 2026] About Anvara: Sponsorship Marketplace Mission | https://www.anvara.com/careers
3. [Anvara, retrieved 2026] Anvara for Brands: AI Sponsorship Discovery | https://www.anvara.com/brands/
4. [Anvara, retrieved 2026] Anvara for Rightsholders: Sell Sponsorships | https://www.anvara.com/rightsholders/
5. [Anvara, retrieved 2026] Anvara for Agencies: White-Label Sponsorship Tools | https://www.anvara.com/agencies
6. [Anvara, retrieved 2026] Anvara Customers: Brand Activation Case Studies | https://www.anvara.com/customers
7. [Anvara, retrieved 2026] Anvara Pricing: Free to White Glove Plans | https://anvara.com/pricing
8. [Anvara, retrieved 2026] Anvara vs SponsorUnited: Comparison | https://www.anvara.com/blog/anvara-vs-sponsorunited
9. [Crunchbase, retrieved 2026] Anvara - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/anvara
10. [Digiday, retrieved 2026] Two Gen Z founders want to change the OOH ad marketplace for their generation | https://digiday.com/media-buying/two-gen-z-founders-want-to-change-the-ooh-ad-marketplace-for-their-generation/
11. [Sports Business Journal, Jan 2026] Anvara secures investment from big sports industry names | https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Articles/2026/01/14/anvara-secures-investment-from-big-sports-industry-names/
12. [LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] Andrei Stenmark - Co-Founder of Anvara | https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreistenmark/
13. [LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] Nick Khalili - Co-Founder of Anvara | https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholaskhalili/
14. [WV News, Sep 2025] BeReal Uses Anvara to Tap College Sports, Sparking In-Stadium Social Surge | https://www.wvnews.com/news/around_the_web/partners/pr_newswire/industry/computer_electronics/bereal-uses-anvara-to-tap-college-sports-sparking-in-stadium-social-surge/article_0d67b740-8037-5862-b386-d487541e68b2.html
15. [PR Newswire, retrieved 2026] Anvara Launches Real World Ad Marketplace for Brands & Agencies | https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/anvara-lunches-real-world-ad-marketplace-for-brands--agencies-302312220.html
16. [PR Newswire, retrieved 2026] BeReal Uses Anvara to Tap College Sports, Sparking In-Stadium Social Surge | https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bereal-uses-anvara-to-tap-college-sports-sparking-in-stadium-social-surge-302555810.html
17. [John Wall Street, retrieved 2026] Programmatic Sponsorship Sales on the Horizon as Anvara Bulks Up | https://www.johnwallstreet.com/p/programmatic-sponsorship-sales-on-the-horizon-as-anvara-bulks-up
18. [Silicon Valley Times, retrieved 2026] An Interview with Anvara's Co-Founders Nick Khalili and Andrei Stenmark | https://siliconvalleytime.com/interview/revolutionizing-real-world-advertising-an-interview-with-anvaras-co-founders-nick-khalili-and-andrei-stenmark/
19. [PitchBook, retrieved 2026] Anvara 2026 Company Profile: Valuation, Funding & Investors | https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/628880-32
20. [G2, retrieved 2026] Top 10 SponsorUnited Alternatives & Competitors in 2026 | https://www.g2.com/products/sponsorunited/competitors/alternatives