Benchmark leads €40 million funding round for Sorare

Sorare, the blockchain fantasy-football platform, has raised €40 million in a Series A funding round, according to ForkLog’s press release.

The funding round was led by venture capital firm Benchmark. It was joined by Accel, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, and Barcelona forward Antoine Griezmann.

The total amount raised across the round reached $60 million. The funds will be used to expand the team and to launch a mobile app.

According to Sorare, the platform’s user base reached 80,000. Sales of unique NFT tokens in the form of cards depicting each football club player grew over the year from €50,000 to €6.5 million. The average monthly growth rate of this metric by the end of 2020 stood at 55%.

The tokens can be collected, sold, and used to participate in virtual tournaments with cryptocurrency prizes. Sorare’s mission is to build a “game within a game.”

To date, the startup has partnerships with more than 130 football clubs worldwide, including European champions and leading teams in the Russian Premier League. Users have access to cards of around 4,000 footballers.

Earlier in October Zenit from Saint Petersburg joined the Sorare platform.

For more on NFTs as a new class of virtual assets, read our article in two parts.

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