Through its LUMO Fund II, LUMO Labs is making a substantial early-stage investment in CityLegends, an emerging urban lifestyle startup. The CityLegends platform connects the urban sports – also known as action sports – and urban culture communities of athletes and artists to meet and compete. CityLegends’ founders and team members themselves are part of this emerging global culture and developed the platform to empower and grow the community.
CityLegends is an urban sports and culture platform for capturing and sharing “spots,” “jams” and “challenges.” It has huge community potential due to its scalability and a unique, culturally influential audience. CityLegends is currently active in the Netherlands and Belgium.
“We are building a platform for the local and global community of unbound urban athletes and artists,” said Jimmy Hermans, co-founder and CEO of CityLegends. “CityLegends is about capturing and sharing video-based creativity and passion for ‘spots,’ ‘challenges’, ‘battles’ and ‘jams’ with others.”
“Urban mentality is very much ‘do it yourself, but do it together,’ and this is exactly the same mentality that we found at LUMO Labs,” Hermans said. “We are proud and thrilled to have the LUMO team and their community of ‘unbound experts’ by our side as we take CityLegends to the next level.”
LUMO Labs’ seed funding and support through its Venture Builder Program will allow CityLegends to further develop the platform and expand its community in Europe and the USA. LUMO’s investment follows CityLegends’ pre-seed funding in 2020 from Belgium accelerator imec.istart.
LUMO Labs is investing based on the quality of the team, scalability of the proposition, and CityLegends’ impact on vitality and community connection. CityLegends has a very powerful founding team, said LUMO Labs founding partner Sven Bakkes. “The founders know their community extremely well,” Bakkes added. “They also know how to use their business and tech skills to the community’s advantage and are determined to do whatever it takes to make their vision for a strong and connected Urban Sports community happen.”
CityLegends’ use of emerging technology, including artificial intelligence and augmented reality, fits LUMO Labs’ impact-driven investment focus, as it does so to contribute to health and wellbeing as well as sustainable cities and communities.
“Among many other good things like physical activity and fun, urban sports is about guts, confidence, and perseverance,” said LUMO Labs founding partner Andy Lürling. “CityLegends builds connections and influence for its community without compromising on the free and open urban culture. Their impact potential is huge because of the scalability and perfect market fit of their proposition.”
The CityLegends team will work from LUMO Labs offices at High Tech Campus Eindhoven with additional bases at Eindhoven Area 51 (Urban Sports & Culture Center) and in Belgium.
Urban Lingo info by CityLegends’ founder Jimmy Hermans:
Urban lifestyle is an emerging youth culture that views cities as playgrounds for unbound athletes and artists. It is a streetwise scene that values creative freedom, imagination, collaboration, generosity, skill acquisition, and constant improvement. Urban is a way of life … for life.
Urban sports – also known as action sports – include, for example, skateboarding, BMX, parkour, inline skating, street football, and dance.
Urban lifestyle terms:
Spots are the places where you experience urban and cultural life: where you meet others and where you fall down and get up again to learn that one cool trick. It can be a small spot around the corner or a big park.
Jams are the places and moments where you train with a chill vibe, challenge each other and meet peers. Urban sports and culture is not something you do casually; it is a lifestyle.
Challenges and battles have a broad definition. It can be that one special place where you always wanted to do a trick or a battle, tournament or any other competition. In competitions, the winners aren’t necessarily the best athletes but athletes with the most creativity.
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