Adidas’
Adi Dassler Family Office (ADFO), which backs
sports entrepreneurship and investment platform leAD Sports, is looking for Indian partners to co-invest in its series A
sports tech fund,
ADvantage. ADFO had started le-AD (legacy of Adi Dassler) Sports as the accelerator programme in 2017, which received a great response from Indian startups.
And while so far leAD has only selected one Indian startup — Delhi-based Rooter — under its accelerator programme, the founders are on the lookout for like-minded partners to coinvest. “We are looking to add one active local partner from India to our ADvantage fund — someone that is as excited about sports tech as we are and, through an investment in the fund, wants to help develop a vision to bring the leAD ecosystem to India,” Horst Bente, Adi Dassler’s grandson and director of ADFO, told ET.
Bente founded leAD three years ago as a platform to reach back to the world of entrepreneurs in sports. “That's what we have in our blood and in our DNA,” Bente said, “So we created leAD and were overwhelmed with applications.” And we realised from the first programme in 2017 that India was a big player in what we're doing, because there was passion for sports and certainly passion for entrepreneurship.”
However, just running an accelerator programme was too modest for ADFO, said Bente. “We realised that there are more opportunities and this space is not disrupted, yet.”