Dream Sports Valued at $8 billion after a new funding

Dream Sports, the parent company of online fantasy gaming platform Dream11 has raised $840 million at a valuation of $8 billion.Dream Sports has diversified its offerings in recent years to cover the ambit of sports technology products and services in India. Recently the company 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.

Harsh Jain, cofounder and CEO of Dream Sports, 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.”

Dream Sports Introduces Payment Solutions Dream Pay

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.

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.

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.

The funding round was led by new and existing investors including Falcon Edge, DST Global, D1 Capital, Tiger Global and Redbird Capital. TPG and Footpath Ventures also participated.

Dream Sports want to build the YouTube, Gmail and Google Maps of sports. Furthermore, it targets 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.