By EMERGING on July 29, 2024
Batbox hopes to become the Puttshack of Baseball
An Eatertainment concept out of Mexico with a high-tech baseball simulator has won a $7.3 million Series A funding round to launch growth across the country ~ Restaurant Business
EMERGING Conversation with Jose D. Vargas and Craig Winning
Golf is an industry that’s generating over $120 billion per year. You would think that baseball is generating more, right?
Baseball generates around 10 to $15 billion a year. So it’s, let’s say, 10 times less.
When you’re playing golf, you can practice and play and interact with the sport in many ways. You can go and travel, you can pay green fees, you can buy golf clubs, you can take lessons. And baseball doesn’t have that. Baseball doesn’t have a place where people can go and enjoy and experience support watch it on television or go to the stadium, right?
And that’s where we see a billion-dollar opportunity, creating a baseball concept for local communities across the US that can go and enjoy their favorite sport with their family, friends, and colleagues. The plan for BatBox is, we’re opening in in Dallas, Q1 next year.
After that, we want to expand through, key baseball cities in US cities like Houston, Boston, Chicago, and Atlanta.
We want to start with those, major league cities and then from that start spanning to smaller communities. And, what we want to do is try to make this accessible for everyone, so that everybody can play in a BatBox that is close to them. We have a very big plan to create a national online community of baseball players where we can not only play in national tournaments, live across all the locations, but against people, in Japan, Korea, Mexico, and Latin America. So we want to create an international community of people competing in the sport and trying, to grow the game through this amazing technology.
There are very crowded spaces in the entertainment. Some concepts now have been working for a lot of years they’re getting obsolete right now, like bowling and maybe other industries that have been the base of entertainment, for a lot of years, right?
Baseball is a huge sport and nobody is doing this right now. So there’s a free highway for us to be able to make this more approachable for people. The second one is the technology. No entertainment concept or sports team concept is gonna work with technology that people don’t enjoy, and that offers realistic gameplay, right? And a fun gameplay.
Source: https://emerging.com/insights/emerging-fund/batbox-jose-d-vargas-and-craig-winning