Dream Sports bags $840 million in new funding at $8 billion valuation
The fresh financing comes on the back of the Mumbai-based Dream Sports
closing a $400 million secondary funding round in March, which valued the company at around $5 billion.
The 13-year-old company has diversified its offerings in recent years to cover the ambit of sports technology products and services in India. It recently
committed $50 million to its in-house sports content and commerce platform, FanCode, in a broader push to become a one-stop destination for sports. Dream Sports also introduced payment solutions through Dream Pay, launched an accelerator called DreamX, and operates DreamSetGo, a sports experiential company. In August the firm said it had set up a corporate venture arm, Dream Capital,
with a corpus of $250 million, to transition into a sports technology conglomerate.
Talking to ET about the fundraise, Harsh Jain, its cofounder and CEO, said that the company’s focus was to create a thriving sports ecosystem in India which goes beyond fantasy gaming. “We are now doing sports commerce, data analytics, merchandise, investing in sports startups and then there are platforms like Fancode which have substantially scaled up for us. We see a massive opportunity in going deep into sports like kabaddi… beyond cricket… and that is what we are aiming to do with this funding.”
Jain said the company will remain private for now, despite a spate of tech startups tapping the public markets. “We are not going to go public because the market is hot, we will do so when we think we are solving a problem. For the next year or so it is not in our plans,” he said.
Cofounded by Jain and Bhavit Sheth in 2008, Dream Sports says it has a user base of 140 million which it wants to leverage and build a complete sports experience around.
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For the financial year ending March 2020, Dream Sports recorded a profit of Rs 180 crore, making it one of the few Indian consumer-tech unicorns to have turned profitable.
In an
earlier interview with ET, Jain had said, “We have one good core business which has market leadership in its area. Now, we want to go and build the YouTube, Gmail and Google Maps of sports. We want to build an Alphabet-like entity, not just Google Search.” Alphabet Inc is Google’s parent company.
The group’s investing arm Dream Capital has so far backed 10 companies, including, Fittr, SoStronk, KheloMore and Elevar. It is now expanding its sports, fan engagement and fitness portfolio in India and globally.
( News Source :Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Rashtra News staff and is published from a economictimes.indiatimes.com feed.)
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