GAMURS, the company behind esports coverage site Dot Esports has closed a $3.5 million (£2.64m) round of funding in a capital raise led by Aura Funds Management. It has also announced a partnership with Puntaa, to launch an ICO for a daily fantasy sports (“DFS”) site with an esports focus.
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The initial report suggests that the money will be used to “expand games coverage” and “go global”. Given the wide reach that GAMURS already has, and CEO and Founder Riad Chikhani’s statement that: “he had chosen to take Aura on as an investor because of its connections to Asia”, could imply that GAMURS is targeting expansion into Asia.
The report suggests that GAMURS is targeting 10 million monthly active users by the end of 2018, with the company currently on track to hit 4.5 million before the end of 2017.
Tristan Terry, Aura Funds Management Associate Director told AFR: “As it becomes more mainstream … you will have the traditional marketing and technology businesses also looking at it and I think the niche tag will slowly disappear and it will become a standalone sector that demands the dollars of more traditional media companies.”
He continued: “For us, the biggest focus of our investment process is to identify those sectors that are rising tides. This is a well-backed business with a strong register and VCs we trust. Riad has also done a great job of building it up from a ‘Facebook for gamers’ and he’s added the right people.”
Interestingly, GAMURS has also partnered with Puntaa to launch Skrilla an esports Daily Fantasy offering. Skrilla is already regulated in Australia but outlined plans for expansion to Europe and North America already. It’s not the first esports DFS offering we’ve seen, and it will likely not be the last.
The other facet of the partnership is the latest in a string of esports betting focused ICO based on Ethereum’s blockchain technology. The Skrilla token will go on sale at October 6th and there’s a “finite number of tokens to be sold”. There’s a maximum of 1,000,000,000 to be sold and it’s 2,500 SKR for 1 ETH. There’s 600,000,000 available on the initial sale and it scales down after the pre-sale. Assuming the quota is fulfilled in the Presale phase, it would mean 240,000 ETH would have been spent and at a value of approx $300 USD, that’s a whopping $72,000,000 raised.
It comes amidst a spate of ICOs being released in the esports space. It seems as if there’s barely two days now before the latest crypto in the world of esports is revealed. As always, it’ll be interesting to see the uptake. The DFS industry still continues to have a tough time, and there’s little proven success in esports just yet. The likes of Vulcun and AlphaDraft are gone yet ESP is still going strong.
Esports Insider says: Congratulations first and foremost to GAMURS for further investment. It’ll be interesting to see the direction that the site takes and if Asian expansion is at the forefront of company policy. As for Skrilla and the ICO, it’s the latest in an ever growing list of esports ICOs. We’ll keep an eye on how it goes.