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)
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CB Insights is a private company database that provides real-time information on the world's most promising companies, their investors, their acquirers and the industries they compete in to help you invest smarter.
Since launching in 2010, CB Insights has become the most trusted and loved source for private company information. Hundreds of clients (including New Enterprise Associates, Cisco, Salesforce, Castrol and Comcast) rely on CB Insights to help them answer the tough questions.
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Raptr is a Silicon Valley based startup that has built a revolutionary social games platform to change the way people play and discover games they like and share their gaming experiences with friends. Raptr makes gaming more fun and social by automatically sharing your gaming achievements and stats with friends while putting an end to the frustrating process of finding and downloading game patches and updates.
Acting as a "Windows Update for games," the Raptr client keeps your games up to date seamlessly using background downloads and a lightweight interface. Raptr automatically tracks your gaming stats and achievements and shares them with your friends. With Raptr, you can see what your friends are playing, what they've recently downloaded, and how they're doing in those games. Raptr also enables you to receive recommendations for new games you might like or meet players who share similar gaming tastes. Raptr is the home for your gaming life.
Founded in 2007 by Xfire co-founder and world champion gamer Dennis Fong, Raptr is backed by several million dollars in funding from an all-star group of investors.
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Hubdub Ltd is a VC funded start-up based in Edinburgh and San Francisco that aims to be the world’s largest developer of premium social games for sports fans. Its main product, FanDuel, transforms traditional fantasy sports ($1bn, 30m people market) into an instant gratification daily game where users win cash prizes every day. It is played on FanDuel.com, via white label partners such as Philly.com, and in future on Facebook and mobile.
