Dream Sports sets up $250 million corporate venture fund

Dream Sports activities, the mother or father firm of on-line fantasy gaming startup Dream11, has arrange a company enterprise arm referred to as Dream Capital with a corpus of $250 million because it seeks to develop into a sporting conglomerate.

“We wish to redeploy our EBIDTA (earnings earlier than curiosity, depreciation, tax and amortisation) and make investments additional into inorganic development,” cofounder and CEO Harsh Jain informed ET in an unique chat. “We’re not a VC fund. We do not have a fund cycle. We’ll present affected person capital,” Jain mentioned, including that the corporate is open to minority investments in addition to acquisitions.

Dream Capital will reduce cheques from $1 million to $100 million and is taking a look at investments within the domains of sport, gaming and health know-how. It’s seeking to put money into about 20 startups that every have the potential to attain at the very least $100 million in annual income inside 5 years.

The fund will make multi-stage investments and has “no exit requirement”. “We do not have to ever money out, so we’re blissful to simply make investments and show you how to construct,” Jain mentioned.

Dream Sports is financing the complete fund from its steadiness sheet. The fund has already made about eight investments,
including $50 million in content material and commerce platform FanCode, which it incubated.

The mother or father firm has been investing in sports activities and gaming startups for a couple of years now. The devoted fund is the results of learnings from earlier investments, Jain mentioned. “We began Dream Sports activities investments as an experiment. We discovered that we did not wish to go after incubating. We wished to again entrepreneurs who’ve already devoted a couple of years of their life to fixing an issue,” he mentioned.

In contrast to a typical enterprise capital agency, Dream Capital will provide entrepreneurs entry to Dream11’s 125 million customers, branding, and go-to-market technique, mentioned Dev Bajaj, managing director of Dream Capital.

“It is a essential technique for us to consider our customers and the place they spend time, and the way we get a much bigger and larger share of their pockets,” Bajaj mentioned. “Now we try to create a platform the place we are able to provide a large number of providers, in sports activities, gaming and health.”

Jain mentioned the 2 waves of the pandemic have been a rollercoaster journey for the sports activities business, and that the suspension and cancellation of a number of sporting occasions has affected the fantasy sports activities business, which depends on reside video games. “We’re at 70-80% by way of our projections. However I can’t complain. Relative to the entire ecosystem clearly we have been capable of run the enterprise comparatively unscathed. We’re worthwhile however we haven’t introduced our numbers,” Jain mentioned.

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ETtech Interview | Dream11 won’t raise funds from Chinese investors ever again: CEO Harsh Jain

On the flurry of Indian tech startup IPOs, Jain mentioned the corporate is “not averse to going public”. “If there is a day that now we have an issue that going public will resolve, we are going to think about it. We have no timeline in any respect to go public.” Jain denied reviews that the corporate has plans to checklist with a
special purpose acquisition company.