Dream Sports has set up a $250 million corporate venture capital fund to further its investments in sports, online gaming, and fitness-tech startups.
Harsh Jain, the co-founder, and CEO of Dream Sports said, “Dream Sports has a collective user base of 125 million sports fans, and we recognize the great growth opportunities in sports, gaming, and fitness-tech in India. As entrepreneurs ourselves, we are here to back other entrepreneurs through Dream Capital and provide them with access to our 125 million-strong user base and operational support from our expert team of CXOs.”
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He further added, “We want to redeploy our Ebitda and re-invest further into inorganic growth because, while organic growth continues, we don’t want to fall into that age-old trap of trying to do everything ourselves.”
It is an achievement to note that Dream Capital’s corpus is similar to that of Stellaris Venture Partners and Chiratae Ventures, which closed $225 million and $337 million funds, respectively. Furthermore, its corpus is also higher than Wipro Ventures, the investment arm of Wipro.
Dev Bajaj, an early investor in Dream Sports and previously a venture partner with Kalaari, said, “We are flexible in our investment stage focus. We did not want to limit our cheque sizes because we do not want to miss out on great opportunities. But we will make an investment of at least $1 million (in companies), and our goal is to scale our portfolio companies to $100 million of annual revenues individually.”
Bajaj also mentioned that the funds focus on ancillary opportunities for the company, “Dream Capital is also open to co-investing with other VC firms, particularly at an early stage. We do not have a preference if we want to lead around.”
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Dream Capital had also gained traction from global sports-tech venture capital firms.
“As a part of our global strategy, we have made investments in global sports and gaming funds. It is not a significant part of the present corpus, though. The fund of funds strategy is primarily there because sometimes we don’t have coverage in certain areas. However, our strategy is largely focused on Indian investments,” Bajaj added.
Earlier this year, Dream Sports raised $400 million in the second funding round, which led to the doubling of its valuation to $5.4 billion in six months. Last year in March, the company’s gross revenue tripled to INR 24,00 crore from INR 920 crore in 2019.