Sorare: $680m Series B 🚀
Fabric Ventures is thrilled to triple down in backing the Sorare team again in their latest $680m Series B alongside Softbank with participation from Atomico, Bessemer Ventures, D1 Capital, Eurazeo, IVP and LionTree as well as existing investors including Benchmark, Accel & Headline.
A bit over a year ago we shared that we were joining Sorare’s $4m seed round to build a rocketship at the intersection of gaming & blockchain. All our wildest expectations have been blown out of the stratosphere by an incredible team executing ahead of the curve on a rising trend of blockchain gaming.
Today Sorare is announcing their $680m Series B led by Softbank with participation from Atomico, Bessemer Ventures & IVP amongst others. Fabric Ventures is tripling down with a new investment in the company and we continue our support by helping build BlackPool into one of the largest gaming NFT DAOs that is a deep believer in Sorare cards.
Sorare has grown to cover 180 clubs including the likes of Real Madrid, PSG, Liverpool, FC Barcelona and Inter Milan, have reached 600,000 registered users and 150,000 monthly active users & have seen $150m of volume traded on their marketplace since the beginning of the year.
We have written two previous posts (Seed & Series A) about the team and opportunity but have not so far focused on the product execution that we have been following for the past 18 months. We believe the Sorare team has excelled at creating a virtuous usage loop that keeps users coming back religiously every week (myself included!) that can serve as a playbook for execution for any NFT gaming project.
Utility for NFTs — the Sorare cards are bought as collectibles, but gain most of their persistent value through their utility in their SO5 fantasy league. Cards can be used twice per week to set teams within a fantasy league, and get scored based on the performance of the players on the pitch whenever they have live football games.
Yield generation — their utility leads to yield in the form of cards and ETH as the rewards for the SO5 fantasy league. Many players can make their capital back in a short period of time, and some players are earning a living from playing Sorare.
At the top end, players are making $5,000–30,000 per week in rewards from playing Sorare.
Active interaction — Sorare requires setting teams twice per week and tracking scores with daily football games. Players are much more engaged than the average NFT collector, creating a much tighter community.
Simple scarcity tiers — the rarity structure of Sorare NFTs is simple to understand: Limited (X/1000), Rare (X/100), Super Rare (X/10) & Unique (1/1). Every new user intuitively understands the value of the different scarcity tiers and sees a clear progression possible.
Data sources — incredibly useful 3rd party websites have been built with the likes of SorareData creating extremely accurate appraisal mechanisms for Sorare NFTs with millions of pricing data points taken into account.
24/7 fast paced auctions — the strongest cards are not locked away in the hands of early adopters — 50% of all the cards are auctioned off on a continuous basis and accessible to anyone to bid. The latest release includes the 2021/2022 Paris Saint-Germain cards including the likes of Messi, Mbappé and Neymar.
Strong secondary market — unlike most NFT projects, Sorare put a lot of effort into building a hyper contextual secondary marketplace to host most of the secondary trading. OpenSea and Rarible are not able to show scoring for recent games, upcoming games, teammates and all other contextual metadata.
Sorare users do all their buying and selling on the Sorare website — both on the primary and the secondary market.
User experience — the team understood early on that the majority of their users would not be blockchain experts, but rather football fans. To cater to this new generation of crypto users, Sorare is built with a custodial wallet set-up that enables more advanced users to export their private keys if they desire to do so, and integrates a fiat on-ramp from Ramp Network (disclaimer: Fabric portfolio company) to abstract away the complexity of ETH. Improvements are still made continuously, but the experience is significantly superior to the average decentralised application for any newcomer.
With a stellar product and this new $680m raise, Sorare will continue their march to signing-on the top 20 football leagues in the world and become the premier creator/minter of IP on-chain for the sports universe for football and beyond!
We are massive believers in the team and the product, as both investors and power-users of the platform.
The team is expecting to expand rapidly, looking to add over 100 team members of the coming 12 months — now that’s a team for which you want to get picked! → Opportunities.
Additional Resources
Sorare’s Website | Twitter | Medium | Discord
If you would like to join this incredible team, Sorare has a few open positions at their office in Paris. Check out openings here.
To learn more about Fabric Ventures, you can visit our website , follow us on Twitter and read our investment thesis.
