Sportsmo

Gamified Giving Delivers a First-to-Market College Fundraising Platform

Sportsmo engaged Allata to build a cross-platform mobile platform that turns college sports fandom into recurring microdonations to athletic departments. Facing budget shortfalls driven by NIL changes and the House Settlement ($21.5M annual reallocation across programs), Sportsmo launched a gamified wallet and pledge experience with a $1 minimum, real-time game triggers, group features and social boosts. Delivered from discovery to first release in seven months, the project used an AI-accelerated development approach to compress timelines and reach a public launch in July 2025.

Services

Industry

Travel Hospitality and Entertainment

OVERVIEW

Allata moved Sportsmo from concept to public app in two phases – discovery (November 2024) and a 26-week delivery sprint that produced the first release in July 2025.

The platform established an early market position for gamified college-sports fundraising, enabling frequent, low-friction giving tied to live-game events.

AI-assisted development and a distributed team doubled sprint velocity, reducing cost and time-to-market.

$1 minimum microdonations with real-time pledge realization and wallet management.
Pre-game donation pledging, social groups with donation boost features, real-time play-by-play updates, and impact recaps with group leaderboards.

THE CHALLENGE

College athletic departments faced a structural revenue shortfall after name, image and likeness (NIL) rule changes, and the House Settlement required roughly $21.5M in annual revenue sharing.

High-stakes timing. Sportsmo needed a live product aligned to the 2025 college football season calendar to prove the concept and attract users, with no option to extend deadlines.

Donors preferred supporting teams directly and resisted traditional solicitation; digital-native alumni required a modern, engaging channel.

Existing apps lacked intuitive design, community features and any meaningful gamification to harness fan passion.

Target users: college alumni and highly engaged college sports fans
Market scale: 136 football bowl subdivision (FBS) schools facing escalating budget pressure
Success criteria: rapid minimum value product (MVP), cross-platform delivery, engaging donation mechanics

OUR SOLUTION

Allata executed a two-phase engagement: a six-week Discover & Define phase for stakeholder alignment, market research, MVP definition and prototypes, followed by a 26-week Delivery Phase using Agile Scrum to implement the production app, regression testing, and app-store deployment. The approach prioritized cross-platform scalability and rapid iteration to meet the football season deadline.

The team integrated AI tools to provide technical context, football-specific domain answers and API implementation guidance for offshore developers. AI assistance – combined with an orchestrated offshore-onshore team – enabled faster issue resolution, reduced handoffs, and increased sprint velocity.

The platform combined gamified donation mechanics such as, pledges, in-game triggers ($1 microdonations), social group functionality (leaderboards, emoji reactions, donation boosts), and a live-game experience (play-by-play recaps and impact visualization). Payment, authentication, and live-data flows were implemented with robust integrations and cloud services to support recurring engagement and secure fund handling.

Core phases: Discover & Define (6 weeks); Delivery (26 weeks) with weekly check-ins and Agile performance reviews.
Key features: wallet withheld funds, pledge realization on game events, group social activity with donation boosting and real-time reactions, and live game play-by-play feed.
Integrations & operations: STATS Perform for live data, Stripe for payments, Auth0 for authentication, SignalR for real-time updates, Singular for marketing analytics.

Fan-funded football is here! Allata has been instrumental in helping me realize my vision for Sportsmo. From storyboarding to software development to thoughtful API integrations, the Allata team led the way. And we met an aggressive timeline, enabling us to launch one month after the House v. NCAA class-action lawsuit and just in time for college football season. For the first time ever, fans can support their favorite college football teams with gamified microdonations based on real-time, play-by-play action.

Chaitan Fahnestock – Founder & CEO

THE RESULT

Allata launched Sportsmo’s public mobile app after seven months of execution, moving the startup from a validated concept to an operational product available to college sports fans.

The app lowered barriers to giving through $1 minimums, real-time opportunities tied to game events and group-driven social mechanics to encourage frequent microdonations.

Introducing and leveraging AI assisted development early in the delivery cycle helped the team roughly double sprint velocity and maintain momentum with a reduced team size toward the end of the engagement.

Public launch: first app release in July 2025 (iOS and Android)
Operational model: funds are held in the Sportsmo wallet and periodically distributed to recipient universities as donations are realized
Measurable delivery impact: 2x sprint velocity after AI integration (Sprint 4 → Sprint 8)

technology

The solution used a cross-platform mobile framework and Azure-hosted backend services to enable scalability, real-time updates and secure payment flows.

Application frameworks and services: Flutter, .NET (C#) API, Firebase
Cloud and data: Azure App Service, Azure Functions, Azure SQL Database, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Cosmos DB
Integrations and tools: STATS Perform API, Stripe, Auth0, SignalR, Singular
AI and developer acceleration: Allatabot (contextual support for developers), Roocode (AI-assisted coding and simulation)