The money never came in fast enough for Fastpoint Games, an L.A. company that provides the technology for fantasy sports games on websites such as NBA.com and Nascar.com.

Fastpoint, headed by “The Apprentice” winner Kelly Perdew, is looking for a buyer. The venture-backed company couldn’t deliver the revenue gains that investors were looking for, Perdew told the Business Journal last week. The board decided a sale would be the best option.

“While we’ve been very successful at growing and delivering value, it has not been a hockey stick for our revenue,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing that most venture capital funds are looking for.”

Fastpoint began considering a sale when it was approached about acquisition over the summer. The company hired Westwood investment bank Covert & Co. to see what other possibilities were out there. Perdew said he’s in talks with four interested parties and hopes to finalize a sale before the end of the year.

Fastpoint’s most likely suitors are media companies. Billy Pidgeon, a senior analyst with Encinitas market intelligence firm M2 Research, said social gaming companies such as Zynga could find value in Fastpoint’s technology.

“Any game company would be interested if they don’t already have that technology,” Pidgeon said. “It would allow them to come up with a more social application than your typical Facebook game.”

In the meantime, Fastpoint is shutting down the fantasy football, baseball, hockey and soccer games that it ran on Facebook. The Fastpoint website says the company will refund all purchases for league entrance fees and trade transactions that customers have made this season.

The seven-person company continues to operate its games for its partners, which include FireLeague fantasy football and MLSsoccer.com fantasy soccer.

Perdew, who rose to fame when he won the second season of Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” TV show, said he will leave the company after the sale. But he already has other projects in which he’s involved.

The entrepreneur is an investor and adviser for many startups, including Santa Monica employee benefits company BetterWorks. He’s also an adviser to DuMont Project, a boutique consultancy firm in Marina del Rey.

“I don’t stay idle very long,” he said.

Fastpoint was founded in 2006 under the name RotoHog as a fantasy sports website – in which players pretend to be team owners and draft and trade players – similar to those found at ESPN.com and Yahoo.com. Perdew took over as chief executive two years later to help the company broaden its offerings and reach profitability.

Since then, the company expanded to operate games for partners such as MLSsoccer.com. It also began powering online games for entertainment and media brands such as reality TV competitions “American Idol” and “So You Think You Can Dance.” It changed its name to Fastpoint last year to reflect the evolving business, keeping the RotoHog name for its fantasy games.

By this year, entertainment games made up about 25 percent of Fastpoint’s business, Perdew said. Despite the changes, the company was not able to deliver high enough sales for its investors, which include San Diego-based Mission Ventures and New York-based Allen & Co. The company reached profitability during busy fantasy sports months, but could not sustain annual profits.

Small market

“It might be a little too small of a market for venture capital,” Perdew said of the fantasy sports industry, which is estimated at more than 32 million people in the United States and Canada. “Only 10 percent are playing cash competitions. You need a whole bunch of those to get to some significant revenue.”

The figure of 32 million comes from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, which estimates the audience has increased more than 60 percent in the last four years.

Peter Schoenke, association chairman and president of Madison, Wis., fantasy news and game website RotoWire.com, said the market for fantasy sports has remained healthy during the recession. But he acknowledged that the industry is still relatively small.

“It’s not that large, but it’s got some size to it and it’s growing really rapidly,” Schoenke said. “The industry in general has a lot of things to look forward to.”

Although he was not able to grow the business as much as he would have liked, Perdew said there’s value in the platform that the company has developed.

“Am I ecstatic about performance? No,” he acknowledged. “Am I comfortable that we created an asset that will sell for a nice amount of money? Yeah.”