Sorare raises a record $680 million Series B round to build the next sports entertainment giant, leveraging NFTs.
When my co-founder and I first laid out our vision for Sorare in the summer of 2018, our ambition was to create a new game that could unlock the limitless potential of non fungible technology. Because of our shared passion for the beautiful game, creating a fantasy football product was the perfect place to begin our journey.
Through Sorare, we have harnessed the potential of a technology that is transforming the gaming industry. Since day one (see our seed deck, and my first blog post announcing Sorare) passionate football fans have bought into our innovative vision and helped propel Sorare to new and dizzying heights.
In February, I announced that Sorare raised a $50M Series A from renowned investors such as Benchmark (investor in Twitter, Snap, Instagram or Discord), Accel and a team of world-class investors including Antoine Griezmann, Rio Ferdinand, Oliver Bierhoff, Alexis Ohanian and Gary Vaynerchuck.
This helped us to greatly accelerate our development and to improve our community’s experience:
- We are building a world-class team and have tripled in size
- We signed a five year partnership with LaLiga & added over 50 national teams and clubs
- We scaled our infrastructure on Ethereum whilst drastically reducing our carbon footprint
- We introduced a new scarcity to make Sorare accessible to all fans globally
In 2021, more footballers, clubs and football fans around the world embraced Sorare’s NFT fantasy model and discovered a new and deeper connection with football. We now have over 180 clubs, 6000 licensed footballers, and 600,000 registered users and we’re only getting started. We are innovative, and have built a model that has set the foundations for the next sports entertainment giant.
New investors have backed us with a record-breaking fundraising round of $680 million, the largest in the history of French Tech and the largest in Europe for a Series B.
Led by SoftBank, this fundraise was made with the participation of Atomico, Bessemer Ventures, D1 Capital, Eurazeo, IVP and Liontree, joining historical investors such as Benchmark, Accel and Partech, and leading business angels including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and football players Gerard Piqué, Rio Ferdinand, Antoine Griezmann and César Azpilicueta.
The record breaking Series B is a huge statement of intent that will greatly improve our NFT fantasy gaming experience for millions of sports fans.
This fundraising will help deliver our key objective: to create the next world champion in sports entertainment, by leveraging NFTs. To achieve this, we will use the funds to:
- Continue to build a world class team — by recruiting the best talents from all over the world. We’re looking to fill many new roles, both in Europe and in the US — check our open positions.
- Sign new partnerships — bringing the top 20 football leagues onboard and the top 50 national teams.
- Accelerate on mobile and marketing — our fantasy game will be a mobile first experience that fans globally will know about.
- Expand into new sports — we’ve received interest from leagues and fans across the globe to replicate our model in other sports. We plan to roll out new sports in 2022.
With Sorare, we’ve experienced an entrepreneurial adventure at the crossroads of sport, gaming and an exciting new technology: NFTs.
Going forward, we wish to give back to the community. Here are three programs that we will be exploring going forward.
1. Supporting community-led football programs: Football can change lives, it brings happiness and should be accessible to all. We are going to work with and support community-led initiatives that aim to bring the magic of football to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
2. Backing young underprivileged entrepreneurs: We were very fortunate that investors supported us in our original Seed funding. We want to offer small businesses the same opportunities we had in their search for funding, specifically in the field of sport and gaming.
3. Supporting female representation in sports: Women’s sports are underrepresented, underappreciated and undervalued. We believe that NFTs can significantly accelerate the development of women’s sports. We will actively invest in this by beginning with women’s football.
In case you missed it, you can watch and share our announcement video over on our Twitter. We would like to thank the Sorare community for the journey so far. They’ve been early believers in our vision. We look forward to keep on growing together as a community, as a game and as a company for years to come.
