We are extremely happy to announce that we have recently just closed a new investment round, successfully raising £1.25M in new funding. If you don’t remember, back in January 2021 we announced our crowdfunding campaign and what our plans were for the near future, now that the campaign has been officially closed we want to let you know what the future looks like moving forward for Maison Sport.
“We set out to challenge the status quo and make a real change”, that’s what our CEO and co-founder Nick Robinson said about the initial motivation that pushed him and co-founders Olly Robinson and Aaron Tipping to start Maison Sport. Taking into account our successful funding round, we can say that the disruption of the industry has been well received by other visionaries and entrepreneurs who have recently invested in Maison Sport.
Existing investors Kevin Byrne, founder of checkatrade.com, and Belgian serial entrepreneur Lorenz Bogaert, co-founder of Massive Media, have backed Maison Sport again. In addition to these key players, we also secured investment from Gareth Williams, co-founder of skyscanner.com. We’re really excited to have Gareth on board and are looking forward to Maison Sport benefiting from his wealth of experience from building a successful tech company within the travel industry.
This successful funding round not only allows us to move forward with our initial 6-month plan, but we also have exciting plans for next year too. Our platform is currently present in over 350 resorts in Italy, France, Austria, and Switzerland, and for season 2021/22 we are planning on expanding into Sweden, Norway, Scotland, and Japan, and from there move into Asia and Latin American by this time next year.
Not only will we be expanding our platform into new territories, but we will also be growing our team at the same time, in fact by the end of the year we will grow our current team from 15 to 20 people. Our team growth plans give us the opportunity to continue to enhance our technology, improving user experience, and also build and develop new brand partnerships.
Having started with a target of £1.4M in mind we are extremely happy to come so close to that initial goal given the circumstance in which the whole world found itself in these past 18 months. “We’ve been blown away that we managed to come really close to the ambitious targets we set ourselves, but it’s taken a lot of hard work, dedication, and resilience” says Nick. This past season we’ve had to overcome challenges that would have been impossible to predict and prepare for but were still able to secure double the number of bookings in Switzerland compared to last year and grow our instructor community to over 1,200 active instructors, making us the third largest selection of instructors compared to any ski school in the world. We also recently surpassed 23,000 hours of lessons taught and now have over 3,400 individual instructor reviews left by previous customers, 90% of which have been 5-stars.
Maison Sport was founded by three ex-pro athletes who have a real passion for the sport and understand the industry, something which is reflected in the outstanding results our co-founders and our team continue to achieve. Their experience as ski athletes and ski instructors themselves has given them the right tools and the correct amount of mental drive, recovery, and resilience to successfully push the company and the team forward. As we are already seeing bookings coming in for next season, we can’t help but get excited and get ready for what is looking to be a pretty intense winter season 21/22!