Golf Media Company Pro Shop Raises $24 Million In Expansion Push (Exclusive)

Pro Shop, the golf media company, has raised $24 million in a new series B funding round, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

The new round was led by Arthur Blank’s family office (Blank is the owner of the Atlanta Falcons and co-founder of Home Depot), joined by Causeway Partners and Ares Capital, alongside returning investors including PGA Tour and Powerhouse Capital.

“I think it’s a very positive signal for what we’re building here and what we kind of set out to achieve. With this new funding round, it’s really an expansion of some of the things we’re doing today,” says Pro Shop CEO Joe Purzycki in an interview. “You’ll see an expansion of some of our franchises like Dan On Golf and The Vanity Index Podcast, which is [co-founder Chad Mumm’s] show on Golf Channel, you’ll see us expand our talent base in a meaningful way and really invest in more programming.”

Pro Shop, which was founded by Purzycki and Chad Mumm in 2023, raised $20 million in 2024, acquiring the PGA Tour’s digital and social media brand Skratch in the process. The company launched a dedicated studio last year, setting Netflix’s Happy Gilmore 2 as its first co-production. The studio also produces Netflix’s Full Swing.

Mumm and Purzycki say that a top priority, alongside expanding their content slate, will be pushing further into live events. That includes live golf programming, where they have The Skins Game on Prime Video on Black Friday and are exploring other opportunities, but also real-world experiences for golf fans.

“Golf is experiential, but it’s also a lifestyle. That that’s the way we talk about it. It’s not even a hobby anymore to people. It’s a way to kind of define your life, and a lot of people go and work their day jobs thinking about that tee time on Saturday or saving up for a bucket list trip,” says Mumm, adding that they are thinking about “how do we take the brands that we have, create opportunities for fans to come and get a club in their hand and participate.”

“We want to expand those franchises into, for lack of a better framing, IRL,” Purzycki adds. “We think the best way to build brands is to bring communities together around these media tentpoles and franchises, and so we are actively hiring a new events lead. We’ll expand on a brand by brand basis an event strategy for each of them, and then I think you’ll see us expand our studio slate.”

But the content will still be a focal point, with the company pairing its scripted and docuseries projects with creator partnerships, podcasts and other programming.

“Listen, I would love for Adam [Sandler] to want to make a Happy Gilmore 3. Hopefully, we don’t wait 29 years for the next one,” Mumm quips. “What we’re trying to do is just obviously stay on the bleeding edge and stay ahead of the curve and try to get to places where we think there’s opportunities before the rest of the market kind of gets there, which sounds trite for anybody doing development anywhere, but you know we’ve really put a lot of focus in the digital side of golf and really trying to build out a media network that feels like we kind of own the conversation around golf, that feels like a space where we really have a right to win.”

And with the PGA Tour, under CEO Brian Rolapp, thinking more intently about content and media, the opportunity to partner with them will only get bigger, Mumm adds.

At the end of the day, Pro Shop’s premise is built on golf as a growing opportunity: More people are playing it, more people are watching content about it, and more people are making content about it (even LeBron James started a golf-centric YouTube channel!). It’s a rising tide.

“10 years ago trying to get any golf project made was impossible, you would get laughed out of the room, and now there’s this ravenous interest because golf has just become this part of pop culture, and I’d like to think that we’ve had some say in that and created some projects that helped accelerate it,” Mumm says, noting that social media changed how people perceived the sport. “All of a sudden everybody who was cool for other things, whether it’s musicians, actors, athletes … all these influential people from all these different worlds, when they’re not doing what they’re known for, more often than not now, they’re out on the golf course and they’re dressed up, and they look cool, and they’re trying to get better, and they’re humanizing themselves, and I think that more than anything has gotten rid of this stigma that had previously existed.”