LinkSports, a Canadian technology company operating across 29 countries, is building what it calls the new infrastructure of sports sponsorship. Founded by Neissan Monadjem, LinkSports is a fintech company with sports content that combines artificial intelligence, standardized athletic challenges, and micro-sponsorship funding into a single platform designed to connect amateur athletes with corporate capital. The greater objective, however, lies in eliminating the problem of gatekeeping in sports sponsorship.
According to Monadjem, corporate budgets in sports often concentrate on elite professionals, while grassroots athletes, who may be equally driven, compete for limited visibility and even scarcer funding. The global sports sponsorship market exceeds $100 billion annually, yet he believes that the vast majority of that capital flows to a narrow section of top-tier talent. "Beneath the surface, there is a fragmented pipeline where millions of young athletes are lacking access to performance benchmarking and sustainable backing," Monadjem explains.
LinkSports positions itself as the structural alternative to that problem, where the AI-powered sponsorships and performance platform enables brands to allocate micro-sponsorships, often as little as $30 per month. Monadjem explains that these micro-sponsorships are structured to help many nonprofessional players.
"We built a system where a company can support 500 or 2,000 boys and girls at once, and do it with data, transparency, and scale. Rather than investing another million into a single global icon, corporations can distribute capital across hundreds of thousands of emerging players," he explains. In that process, LinkSports aligns brand growth with measurable grassroots engagement.
Monadjem's own journey into sports technology began outside the professional pitch, "I was a lousy football player, but I didn't need to be an excellent football player to create LinkSports. Similarly you don't have to be a former taxi driver to launch Uber", he says. He watched his sons dream of football careers and began scrutinizing the structural inequities they faced surrounding access to opportunity. "I asked myself: what can I do to change the game? That opportunity, to me, crystallized into a solution that appeals to everyone, even those who don't have the money to buy sports shoes," he says.
Armed with his background in Fintech and IT, he leveraged his skills to create a digital infrastructure that standardizes athletic evaluation and connects the data to a sponsorship engine. The app champions a non-biased methodology wherein athletes create a digital score card called "flip card," including biometrics and self-assessed attributes across categories such as speed, endurance, ball control, and shot accuracy.
They then complete 15 standardized athletic challenges, which can be filmed with any smartphone. Once uploaded, the platform allows the AI engine to benchmark performance within age and gender cohorts. He highlights that, as each participant may perform identical movements under the same parameters, the rankings would be accordingly consistent and globally comparable. "A game is hard to quantify across borders. But if every player runs the same drill over the same distance, the data becomes objective. AI thrives on standardized input," Monadjem explains.
Expanding on that tech-driven model, LinkSports also encompasses a dual revenue model where fans can fund micro-sponsorships while corporations can engage through brand sponsorships. According to Monadjem, funds can be deployed as stipends redeemable through sports gear gift cards to maintain transparency and athlete benefits. Brands can allocate budgets based on geography, gender, socioeconomic indicators, or performance metrics. The goal, he insists, is to transform sponsorship into a measurable acquisition and an individually auditable support. LinkSports' dedication to supporting athletes shows by expanding and onboarding international coaches, such as Gerhard Benthin, who acts as one of their 'resident coaches', providing evaluations and deeper insights to the athletes from a professional perspective.
LinkSports also intersects with a growing imperative around female sports participation. Research shows that by the age of 14, girls are twice as likely to drop out of sports as boys, often due to social expectations and financial barriers. As Monadjem focuses on increasing sponsorship capital for female athletes, he positions participating brands at the forefront of an expanding and undercapitalized market segment. "We always encourage fans to funnel their support to female players," says Monadjem, particularly in preparation for the next Women's World Cup in Brazil.
Technology also reframes the company's digital engagement philosophy. Amid widespread debate around social media addiction among youth, LinkSports measures success differently. "Our KPI is not how long kids scroll," Monadjem says. "Our KPI is how many hours they spend training, recording challenges, and improving their performance." In essence, he notes that screen time can become output-driven rather than consumption-driven, aligning digital behavior with healthy physical activity.
LinkSports' future expansion plans target more than one million young players globally, spanning multiple sports disciplines. With the commercial momentum building around global sports events in 2026, such as the FIFA World Cup, Monadjem believes that brands are evaluating long-term grassroots positioning strategies. Within that demand, LinkSports seeks to offer a data-backed solution well before the spotlight turns global.
"Investors sometimes think we're a nonprofit because the impact is so visible, but impact and profitability are not opposites. We are successfully building the future of sports sponsorship; our revenue has increased 450% since 2024", he says. With that objective in mind, Monadjem aims to replace exclusivity with accessibility, intuition with AI benchmarking, and passive audiences with participatory ecosystems.
"Talent is everywhere," Monadjem reflects. "A bridge to opportunity is what we are engineering, and we are building the infrastructure so that backing the next generation becomes both smart business and smart strategy."
