Where DMP came from2003 → 2019
DoubleMatchPoint’s origin story goes back to 2003 when one of our founders, Mike, was playing tennis at the Cumberland Lawn and Tennis club in London, UK. As an early dot-com executive, Mike was always on the look-out for ways to create interesting digital products having worked at the first digital ad agency to place an ‘ad banner’ on the web way back in 1995.
During a tennis hitting-session with an up and coming screenwriter, Mike learned about an innovative tech company called ThinkingCap which was led by a guy named Dr Dave Romano-Critchley. Intrigued by what ThinkingCap was up to, Mike gave them a project to build a web-crawler to help power then European pay-per-click leader eSpotting. This was a very competitive space back when Yahoo, Google, AskJeeves and eSpotting were battling for supremacy in the European market for PPC solutions. We all know who won that battle. ( Google 😉 )
eSpotting went on to be sold to a US-based pay-per-click network, but Dave and Mike kept in touch.
In 2006, Mike & Dave decided to start a real-estate search engine called Zoomf. With Mike’s digital ad background, and Dave’s extensive engineering chops, they decided there was a good opportunity in the real estate space to create a next generation search engine for property. They raised $2.3 million in funding for Zoomf which was then competing against leads behemoth Rightmove. After 2.5 years, Zoomf was sold to the Trinity Mirror publishing group to be part of their digital property portfolio.
Mike moved back to the USA in 2010. Dr Dave and Mike always knew there would be a second act to their partnership. In 2019 they decided there was an opportunity in the racquet space and DMP was born. This was after a lengthy discussion about why it would NOT be a good idea to go into the crypto space. Good choice.
That’s the short version of the history and the birth of DMP! It’s a 2nd act for Dave & Mike in an industry undergoing phenomenal growth and change.