Anvara Aims to Build Marketplace for Advertisers Looking for Events to Sponsor

A digital upstart thinks it has what it takes to help advertisers sweat the small stuff.

Andrei Stenmark says he’s out to help marketers make sense of the so-called “IRL (in real life) economy,” or a myriad of events that might range from food festivals and bar promotions to even a pickleball tournament or the U.S. Open. His Anvara, co-founded with Nick Khalili, offers a marketplace of intriguing promotional opportunities that might be available in a sports stadium or music festival, or at a college coffee shop, and helps arrange the details quickly thereafter.

“There’s really zero transparency in this market,” says Stenmark, who believes that advertisers spend too much time searching for these sorts of sponsorships, then contacting organizers and sussing out details. “We like to think that we are building the rails and pipes for brands that happen to use these opportunities.”

Anvara would be the latest company to try to make a business out of organizing something that was previously haphazard. Entrepreneurs have built empires like Airbnb out of creating a system to find temporary housing inventory in apartments and bed-and-breakfasts. Others have tried to do similar work for advertisers, like determining what TV shows and movies had opportunities for product placement, or, more recently, devising ways for smaller advertisers to utilize intellectual property from CBS programs in exchange for promoting them.

Anvara seeks to organize a marketing discipline that truly generates millions, even billions, in sponsorship dollars. So-called “out of home” advertising revenue rose 3.6% in 2025, to $9.46 billion, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America, a trade organization.

Reaching people at events they enjoy may be more appealing as other media channels get clogged with commercials, Stenmark suggests. “You are. You are hammered with ads, left, right, and center, some better, some quite horrible,” he says. “I think showing up IRL is a really strong way to cut through that noise.”

Kalshi, the prediction market, has used Anvara to sponsor events tied to the World Cup and football games. “It would take me a long time to get what I would need” without a service like Anvara’s, says Jake Khorozian, Kashi’s events lead. “They give us access to smaller, more localized things that I would not have come across myself.”

Such services may be more in demand by advertisers that are in near-constant communications with potential customers, says Stenmark, such as consumer-products giants and restaurants. “The best brands for us at the current moment are brands that are always on, brands that need to be showing up consistently with relevance” or that are eager to have consumers sample new products.

There may also be a chance for marketers who might not typically think of such promotions to get more involved with them. Movie studios don’t frequently sponsor live events, says Stenmark, but that’s often because they are looking to launch new films within a very short window and may not have the resources to plan for a longer term. What if, he asks, a sports team were to begin listing a six-week rotation at a stadium or sports facility? “That can empower a new filed to come in and show up — frictionless,” he adds.

Anvara hopes to forge tighter alliances with some of the industry’s bigger media-buying agencies, says Stenmark, a move that might open its inventory to a wider swatch of marketers, and potentially bring new events under its umbrella.