Tech & Business
5.29.2020
Grintafy: the social network for amateur soccer players
Creating a social network for soccer, this is the great idea of Majdi Allulu, a Saudi engineer who launched Grintafy, a platform that helps football players who want to become professionals to find clubs.
After a career in big Saudi tech companies, Majdi Allulu decides to launch his own in 2017. Grintafy is born, a “sportech” platform that combines the technical expertise of this computer engineer and his passion for soccer. Since then, his start-up has just raised $1.25 million two weeks ago. An encouraging step for the company which plans to improve the local scouting domain for sports athletes, enhance amateur talents, and further develop the regional sports industry. Meet this passionate “techpreneur” who is developing the vision of football in the kingdom.
How did the idea of Grintafy come up and what is the technology behind it?
I’m a big soccer fan and I was really good when I was young, but I never got the chance to make it. One day, I was sitting down and my older kid was asking me if I could help him out get a pitch booked and this is how it started. We were 8 people and the pitch was really big so I was thinking why don’t we create an app where you can find people here and there, and get them together? And from there, I started to think about careers and decided to make it more professional. I thought that my background in Tech and love for football could be a perfect marriage. Today, Grintafy is a LinkedIn for football players, where a player built his own football CV using different services of the platform. He is supposed to use the application to upload his videos, footages, connect through people across the globe to make it. Through the platform, we also have a three dimensions rating service where players get rated by their peers based on their skill set, but also by the public of the platform thanks to a large streaming service where people can watch amateur football play and rate them after a match, and the third is the grinta technology itself with wearable devices that measure the performance of the players. So, it’s a 360 notation model.
How was your company affected by the Covid-19 situation?
Obviously, the whole Grintafy experience is built on gathering and getting people together, so we get affected by the pandemic a lot and the traffic went down. So we tried to implement two new features on our app, like home workouts for people who want to be able to get ready when the situation is over. It is called “Get Fit” and it includes different kinds of football workouts that can be done from home like warm-ups, pulling down techniques, speed cuts … but also a lot of shows and live broadcast training sessions given by professional players. If the traffic hasn’t come to normal yet, it helped a little bit.
You manage to do a massive seed funding of 1,25 millions of dollars during the pandemic. What are your plans for the future with this money?
We have been talking to Aramco for 8 months, so it has been a long discussion and this period was just used to close the deal. We have big plans for the future whenever we go back to business. Back in December, we stood a very big deal to grow up top professional soccer players in Saudi, they are class A players in the current league in Saudi, and we are the scouting technical support. We will be also releasing two new products to the market which help scouts, clubs, and academies discover and manage players which are “Grintafy pro” and “Grintafy academies” for academies looking for young players from 8 to 15 years old.
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