Despite Google’s crackdown on ‘gambling’ apps on the Play Store, it’s no surprise that fantasy sports involving real money are becoming increasingly popular. This is why, five months after it had secured a whopping $90 million, Mobile Premier League (MPL) has raised a fresh round of $95 million in a new financing round.
MPL’s latest investors, Moore Strategic Ventures and Composite Capital have given it a post money valuation of $945 million, reports say. With this development, Mobile Premier League has nearly doubled its valuation in just a few months. MPL was valued at about $465 million last September, during its previous financing round.
Existing investors and partners like RTP global, SIG GO-ventures, Telstra Ventures etc. also invested in the round, bringing the company’s to-date-raise to a massive $222.5 million.
MPL is a Bangalore based startup, and hosts a variety of e-sports tournaments and has also recently added fantasy sports section. MPL does not develop its own games but is a host for about 70 game developers. While fantasy sports have only recently started gaining its fan following, the COVID-19 outbreak has created a progressive curve in the real money sport game.
However, MPL is competing with decade old and much more established companies, with higher investment rates. Moreover, MPL is not available on play store either, which makes its rapid growth trajectory even more impressive.
The startup has stated that it will use the new funds to organize more e-sport tournaments in the country and beyond, and accelerate its international presence. Currently, MPL has 60 million users in India and 3.5 million in Indonesia.
MPL had signed up Virat Kohli when they were a three-month-old company, soon before they got out of play store -which does not host fantasy games. Back then, the startup was warned that this would make its growth very hard. However, it persevered and has grown despite the various restrictions. Its recently organized College Premier League saw a participation of more than 13,000 gamers ranging across 100 colleges.
