Confirmed: Netcompany joins Ineos as title sponsor for next five years

Ineos Grenadiers will be known as Netcompany Ineos from next month after the Danish IT company confirmed that it has come on board as a title sponsor for the next five years.

Netcompany’s arrival was announced at a presentation in London on Tuesday morning. It has been reported that Netcompany will provide €100 million to the team budget over the next five years, though neither the team nor the new sponsor have confirmed the figure. In a statement on Tuesday, Ineos trumpeted the use of Netcompany’s ‘Pulse’ AI platform as a key aspect of the partnership. 

The team’s WorldTour licence is still owned by Jim Ratcliffe of Ineos, and Dave Brailsford retains his position overseeing the team.

“This is more than a sponsorship, it’s a partnership with purpose. It brings long-term stability, giving us the platform to invest in performance over time - building the foundations to win, and keep winning,” Brailsford said. “Ultimately, it’s about creating the conditions to win the Tour de France.”

On its foundation as Team Sky in 2010, Brailsford’s team had the biggest budget in cycling, and that translated into seven Tour de France victories in eight years between 2012 and 2019. 

Since and Ineos Ratcliffe took over ownership in 2019, they have been overtaken by UAE Team Emirates-XRG, who have built a team of astonishing depth around Tadej Pogacar. Meanwhile, squads like Decathlon CMA CGM, Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe and Lidl-Trek have also had significant increases in their spending power in recent seasons thanks to new sponsors and owners.

Other teams, including EF Education-EasyPost and Visma | Lease a Bike, have publicly revealed that they are canvassing for additional backers in order to keep up with the biggest budgets in the peloton.

Ineos have already sought to augment their budget by bringing TotalEnergies on board as a sponsor last year, and their hope is that the injection of Netcompany cash will bring them closer to UAE – though it is not immediately clear if the Danish IT company’s backing will increase their budget by €20 million per year or if it will offset a reduced commitment from Ratcliffe.

Ratcliffe took over as owner of the former Team Sky in May 2019, and he enjoyed immediate success when Egan Bernal claimed that year’s Tour de France. It was the team’s seventh Tour in eight years, but they have fallen further and further off the pace at the world’s biggest race in the years since.

Amid the domination of UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Visma | Lease a Bike in the 2020s, Ineos have only managed two podium finishes at the Tour, by Richard Carapaz in 2021 and Geraint Thomas in 2022, though they won the Giro d’Italia through Tao Geoghegan Hart in 2020 and Egan Bernal in 2021.

Ineos’ highest finisher at the 2025 Tour was Thymen Arensman, who placed 12th overall after winning two stages along the way, but their race was overshadowed by the news that the International Testing Agency had launched an investigation into soigneur David Rozman’s links to the disgraced doctor Mark Schmidt.

After his wildly unsuccessful spell at Manchester United, Brailsford returned to the Ineos fold ahead of last year’s Tour, with team CEO John Allert declaring him to be “like a kid in a candy shop.”

Brailsford has since appointed Geraint Thomas as director of racing at Ineos, while the team prised Oscar Onley away from Picnic-PostNL after he placed fourth overall at last year’s Tour. The Scot will lead Ineos’ challenge at this year’s Tour alongside Kévin Vauquelin. 

According to the Times, Brailsford has internally dubbed the team’s Tour planning as “Mission 8,” a reference to their bid to win yellow for an eighth time. Brailsford had previously used the phrase “Mission 21” to refer to Manchester United’s doomed attempts to regain the Premier League title on his watch.