From left to right: Grid Finder investor Kevin Beales, founder Thomas Bunten and CTO Nikhil Patel
Newcastle-based tech startup, Grid Finder, has raised an investment of £200,000 to develop its gaming and esports community platform focused on sim racing.
Grid Finder helps sim racers find racing and helps esport community managers manage their race calendars, results and standings, communication and more.
The investment comes from an angel syndicate led by Kevin Beales.
Grid Finder was set up by Newcastle locals and motorsport fans Tom Bunten and Nikhil Patel. They identified that the sim racing market was growing quickly but fragmented. The UK is home to some talented sim racers – British sim racer James Baldwin won the Alpine Esports Series Championship a few days ago, and two British teens won the Rokit Racing Star esports competition.
The platform has been built to bring communities together and lower the barrier to entry for racers and community managers.
Founder Tom Bunten built Grid Finder in his kitchen on a free web building tool around 18 months ago, now it has more than 1,800 esports communities/sim racing leagues listed on its site and 40,000 sim racers a month using the platform to find their next esports community.
Tom said they’re using the new investment money to ‘build the platform into a global esports management suite that will help people connect and race online and save passionate community admins hours of their spare time’.
“This investment from Kevin allows us to take Grid Finder from being a “passion project” to being a major player in the sim racing world.”
Tom Bunten, Grid Finder
Tom, Kevin and Nikhil first met at a networking event for the Ignite Accelerator at By The River Brew Company. The three clicked and Nikhil and Kevin loved the Grid Finder concept. A week later they were in the Everyman Cinema cafe discussing an investment deal.
Tom Bunten, founder of Grid Finder, said: “I built Grid Finder to solve a problem for what I thought was a relatively niche group of sim racers I’d been racing with online.
“Six months later, over 1,000 esports communities had listed themselves on Grid Finder and I realised this was a real opportunity to build a useful suite of tools that solves problems for over 1.8m sim racers and hundreds of millions of casual online racers worldwide.
“I met Grid Finder’s new CTO, Nikhil, and our investor, Kevin, in the queue for the bar at the Ignite social event at By The River Brew Co. in late 2021. Nikhil and I joined the accelerator and closed our funding round with Kevin in early 2022. This investment from Kevin allows us to take Grid Finder from being a “passion project” to being a major player in the sim racing world.
“We now have the means to develop faster and market Grid Finder to a larger audience. Most importantly, we now have the advice and guidance of Kevin and his investment syndicate who between them have decades of experience in sales and SaaS.”
Kevin Beales, angel investor, added: “From our first casual meeting at the Ignite event, I was impressed by what Tom had achieved in such a short period, the scale of opportunity globally and his vision. When shared with other angel investors, they felt the same and we were keen to support Tom and Nikhil.”
Grid Finder aims to raise further investment later in 2022 and the company is now working on both building its virtual community base and expanding into real-world motorsport racing.
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Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
