Do you ever realized that nobody really talks about the e-sports category? It’s a space that I’ve covered many times, with numerous companies, including e-sports betting leagues and game-streaming sites and video capture communities, all raising funding or getting acquired. It’s a fast growing space, and one that seems to get ignored a lot of the time.
Now we can see just how fast it is growing as deal activity in the e-sports category hit a record quarterly high in the second quarter of this year, according to new data from CB Insights, with $37 million invested in 12 different deals.
The amount of funding is actually down a bit from the previous quarter, when $40 million was invested in 8 deals in the first quarter of 2015. The record for the amount of funding put into this space occurred in the first quarter of 2014, when $54 million was invested in only three deals.
A big spotlight was put onto this space when social video platform Twitch was acquired by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars in September of 2014.
Twitch is a company that allows gamers to record live broadcasts of their videogames. The company has raised a total of $35 million in venture capital funding, including a Series C $20 million investment led by Thrive Capital with participation from WestSummit Capital and Take-Two Interactive Software in October 2013.
Since that acquisition, the space has exploded. Companies in the e-Sports and game-streaming categories have raised just over $295 million since the start of 2010, according to CB Insights data. The most amazing part: that over half of those deals, a total of 56% of them, have come since, you guessed it, September of 2014. It is not a coincidence that that just happens to be when the biggest deal in this entire category went down.
Since then, some of the big deals in the e-sports space have included Vulcun, a tournament site for fantasy e-sports, raising $12 million; Raptr, an optimization platform for PC gamers, raising $14 million; daily fantasy sports platform AlphaDraft raising $5 million; FanDuel, a provider of fantasy sports league, raising $70 million; and sports video analysis platform Hudl raising $72.5 million.
Other big players in this space include gaming video site Machinima, which raised a $24 million financing round in February for a total of $92 million; video game tournament company Major League Gaming, which has raised $67 million; Azubu, a global broadcast network specializing in delivering premium live and on-demand eSports programming, which has raised $35 million; and Kamcord, which helps players record and share video game playing, which has raised $28 million in funding,
(Image source: neoteo.com)
