Sorare announced today that it has received $50 million in a Series A funding led by a team of investors and footballers who wanted to financially support this fantasy football project based on the Ethereum blockchain.
Sorare worked with the American Benchmark, one of the best known and longest-running venture capital firms that has also already invested in major companies such as Twitter, Snap, Instagram and Discord.
All of these funds will be used to hire new top-notch professionals to join their team, launch a new mobile app and bring 20 more of the world’s top football teams into Sorare.
Sorare now boasts dozens of teams including Juventus, Roma, Lazio, Inter FC, River Plate, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Zenit St Petersburg, Paris Saint Germain and many more.
Each team and each player comes to Sorare in the form of Non Fungible Tokens (NFT). Users can buy these digital figurines to create their own virtual teams of 5 players and compete against each other as in normal fantasy football.
Sorare’s advisors include former Spanish footballer Gerard Piqué who invested €3 million.
The success of fantasy football on the Sorare blockchain
It is growing by an average of 32% every month, counting more than 80,000 users worldwide, with $9 million in cards sold in 100 countries.
In December 2020, this platform helped provide a new revenue stream for over 110 football clubs, generating over €1,500,000 in NFT sales per month.
Sorare’s founder, Nicolas Julia, was a simple football fan before being an entrepreneur and wanted to transpose his passion and his being a sticker collector to the world of blockchain, as he explained in a post on Medium:
“Before I was an entrepreneur, I was a football fan. My football journey started in 1998 when France hosted and won the World-Cup. I completed my first sticker album that summer with Zidane, Ronaldo and Bierhoff. It brought me closer to my passion, closer to the game and closer to my friends. Collecting those stickers created meaningful connections that I have to this day.”
