Goalhanger, the production house behind some of Britain’s most successful podcasts, has formally moved into the venture business.
The company has unveiled Goalhanger Ventures, a new investment and partnerships arm designed to back creator-led media businesses with credible plans to scale across video, audio, social, live and commercial channels.
The unit launches with two opening moves: an equity investment in Invisible Media, the company behind the rapidly expanding digital platform The Invisible Hand, and a commercial partnership with Backyard Cricket, the Yorkshire-born sports content brand built by brothers James and Mark Wood.
The strategy reads as a natural extension of Goalhanger’s record-breaking run in podcasting, which has produced The Rest Is Politics, The Rest Is History and The Rest Is Football. With Ventures, the business is signalling that the next chapter is platform-agnostic, and increasingly weighted towards founders building serious audiences on YouTube and social video.
Backing The Invisible Hand
The first cheque has gone to Invisible Media, founded by Charlie Tymon. The Invisible Hand has carved out an unusual niche, using crisp, visually-driven storytelling to make economics, geopolitics, business and culture digestible for younger audiences. New formats are already in the pipeline, including The Invisible Game, which lifts the lid on the hidden economics behind everyday decisions.
That positioning matters commercially. According to Oxford Economics, YouTube’s creative ecosystem contributed more than £2bn to UK GDP in recent years and supports tens of thousands of full-time equivalent jobs — a market in which intelligent, format-led creators are now a credible alternative to traditional broadcast economics.
Tymon framed the deal as an acceleration rather than a pivot. “Goalhanger has built a strong track record of bringing together audiences around intelligent, accessible conversation across politics, history and entertainment,” he said. “With The Invisible Hand, we’ve already shown that younger UK audiences are engaging at scale with content about macroeconomics, business and geopolitics — proving there is a real appetite for serious ideas when they are delivered with clarity, energy and purpose. Through this investment, we’ll be able to draw on Goalhanger’s expertise in building, scaling and monetising industry-leading IP as we grow a brilliantly aligned, YouTube-first business with huge potential.”
From garden cricket to global brand
The second deal is, on the face of it, a very different proposition. Backyard Cricket began as a lockdown project, with James and Mark Wood filming irreverent garden cricket videos in Yorkshire. It has since become one of the most distinctive emerging sports creator brands in the UK, with the pair travelling internationally to make content that fuses humour, personality and a clear love of the game.
Goalhanger will provide funding and strategic support to scale production, longer-form video, sponsorship, commercial partnerships and merchandise, with both parties sharing in the upside.
Navid Behroozi, Executive Producer at Backyard Cricket, put the rationale bluntly. “James and Mark have already done the hardest part: they have earned a huge amount of attention by making cricket feel fun, personal and culturally relevant online. Our job now is to help turn that momentum into a more sustainable business around the content. By giving them more production support and helping open up new commercial opportunities, we can let them spend more time doing what their audience comes for — creating brilliant cricket entertainment.”
The founders themselves remain refreshingly unfussed. “Backyard Cricket started with us playing in the garden, arguing over close calls and sending decisions upstairs for DRS,” James and Mark Wood said in a joint statement. “It was never meant to be too serious, but we’ve always taken the cricket seriously. The last few years have been mad for the channel, and it’s been brilliant seeing how far the game travels. Working with Goalhanger gives us the chance to build on that and keep growing Backyard Cricket even further.”
Why this matters for the wider market
Goalhanger Ventures arrives at a pivotal moment. Social media creators are on track to eclipse traditional media in global ad revenue, and incumbents are scrambling to adjust, with even the BBC striking a landmark deal to produce original shows for YouTube. The infrastructure gap between a fast-growing channel and a properly run media business has, for many independent creators, been the single biggest brake on growth.
That gap is precisely what Ventures is being designed to fill. The arm extends the work begun in January by The Accelerator, Goalhanger’s training and mentorship programme for creators looking to graduate from short-form to longer-form IP, and was first flagged by trade press including Press Gazette when Goalhanger took on its own outside capital from The Chernin Group earlier this year.
Co-founder Jack Davenport said the philosophy is one of careful scaling rather than corporate absorption. “Goalhanger Ventures is about giving exceptional creator-led businesses the infrastructure to grow without losing what made them special in the first place. Invisible Media and Backyard Cricket are very different propositions, but they both have that rare combination of editorial clarity, audience trust and genuine momentum. Our role is to help them scale thoughtfully, commercially and creatively, while protecting the independence, personality and quality that their communities already respond to.”
For Britain’s SME creator economy, where most of the country’s most-watched faces still run lean, founder-led businesses, Goalhanger Ventures may yet prove one of the more meaningful answers to the question of what comes after virality.