Dravstream Technologies Pvt. Ltd. – SportVot, a SportsTech company raised an undisclosed seed round led by Ankur capital. Other investors included Capital A, SucSEED Indovation Fund, and Marwah Sports.
SportVot is a hyperlocal sports platform that aims at creating an online channel to stream sports events and help discover sports talent from the grassroots of India while creating a community of sports enthusiasts. India has over 10 million aspiring/emerging athletes (U-19), and around 100k + semi-professional/ professional tournaments occur annually. But most athletes do not get access to the right set of tools and platforms to showcase their talent and engage with the ecosystem. This results in a lack of transparency in talent discovery which in turn increases the number of dropouts in the Indian Sports Ecosystem.
Most of the sports games, other than the premier tier sports tournaments are not live-streamed or telecast across any platform in India. Sports streaming is expensive and complicated. A traditional broadcasting setup involves dependency on external service providers for expensive hardware, multiple complicated software and apps, and a special arrangement for OB vans. This makes the digitization of local games very difficult and hence no visibility to local talent. There is a need for a cost-effective streaming platform that undertakes the needs of teams, franchises, and fans. SportVot not only enables streaming with the least amount of resources but also has a rich layer of tools overlay to edit, analyze, and share the videos across various channels.
With internet penetration, sports viewership is increasing by the day. Events such as the Pro-Kabbadi league gets 330+ Million views every season and its success has spawned multiple tournaments across the country at all levels. This has drawn thousands of players. It is similarly played out in volleyball (Brahmaputra Volleyball League) to Kho-Kho (Ultimate Kho-kho), and basketball (Pro-basketball) among others. This has seen a cascading impact on local sports events being conducted across the country. SportVot will enable every match being played in the remotest part of the country to be available for scouts sitting in urban India.
Sport is a great leveler and we see sports as a tool to engage youth and provide many career opportunities for players and other related support careers. We have seen the financial opportunities it has opened up for Pro-Kabbadi players in the last couple of years. With most of these sportspersons coming from impoverished backgrounds, it has opened up new career paths from trainers to scouts to physios and sports administrators apart from players. The first step in that process is creating visibility and transparency in the games at different levels. SportVot with its cutting-edge technology is the only tech player in India focused on this area. SportVot has streamed over 18,000 sports matches, amassed 75M views, and featured over 90,000 upcoming athletes so far. Led by second-time entrepreneurs Sidhhant, Shubangi, and Yash, SportVot has the right mix of technologists and sports enthusiasts to create a global SportsTech platform.
Rema Subramanian, Managing Partner Ankur Capital said, “Sportvot enables young sports persons to showcase their talent and be discovered, leading to penetration of sports into the masses and making India a leading sports nation.”
Ankit Kedia, Founder of Capital-A, said, “At Capital A, our endeavor is to build an ecosystem that supports the diversity of tech-driven startups who can contribute to the growth of the national economy. We have backed a number of brands in various verticals and are always keen to support startups that can emerge as differentiators and enablers in their domains. Our investment in Sportvot is a continuation of that strategy. Sports are a part of Indian pop culture, and through its combination of technology and focus on the local sporting talent as well as events, SportVot has rapidly gained a significant standing in its domain. With a unique approach to not just showcasing talent from all over India, but also building an entire ecosystem that benefits all stakeholders, the platform is bound to grow as a major force.”
Speaking on why they have invested Vikrant Varshney Co-Founder & Managing Partner of SucSEED Indovation Fund, said, “According to the Marketwatch, Global Live Streaming Market is expected to reach $24 billion by 2027 to register a CAGR of 28.1% during the projected period. Live video streaming is trending nowadays due to the increasing acceptance of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Hotstar, and many more. SportVot provides a cost-effective and convenient end-to-end solution to sports bodies and tournament organizers for capturing and broadcasting their games, audience/community engagement, brand sponsorships, and monetization.”
Pranav Marwah, CEO of Marwah Sports said, “Having tracked the team’s progress from their original product avatar, it gives us immense pleasure to see them crack product market fit in a highly underserved market in India. Offering live video streaming with native advertising opportunities alongside high-quality production tools, all at an extremely affordable price, they have created a full-suite platform to showcase the next generation of local sporting heroes.”
Sidhhant, Co-Founder, SportVot, quoted, “The latest fundraise will help us scale our product and technology. We look to expand into new geographies across the country and bring access to live video capture to as many sports games as possible. We are extremely delighted to have our new investors on board and I look forward to working together with them as we discover the next generation of sports talent across the country"
SportVot is an Indian Sports platform where you can watch local match live streams, highlights, and emerging athletes of India. This is made possible with SportVot’s unique media technology to make local sports streaming more easy, cheap, and accessible to the sports ecosystem, called the SportVot Broadcasting Suite. This technology enables these tournament organizers and clubs to make their tournaments fully digital right from producing multilingual interactive streams, automated highlights and scoring to fixture management, which in turn assist these unique sports talent, and even tournaments, to get more support and visibility in the country.
Ankur Capital (https://www.ankurcapital.com/) is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in digital and deep science technology companies. Established in 2014, Ankur Capital looks to uncover and unlock opportunities in overlooked markets across India. They were the first institutional investors in notable companies including Captain Fresh (supply chain platform for animal proteins); Cropin (SaaS-based suite putting farms on the cloud); Rupifi (B2B BNPL platform powering MSME growth); String Bio (synthetic biology platform converting methane into alternative proteins); and Vegrow (smart matchmaking platform for fruits). From seed to scale, Ankur Capital has 29 companies in its portfolio across two funds.
SucSEED Indovation Fund (SIF) is an AIF Cat-1 Venture Capital Angel Fund with ₹100 crore corpus and has grown out of SucSEED Angel Network (SAN) and IIITH Tech Ventures, an early-stage tech seed initiative with IIIT Hyderabad Foundation. General Partners of the Indovation Fund have 100+ years of cumulative experience within technology, fund management, and start-up ecosystem and have already invested in 60+ startups. SIF attempts to support Indian Innovation for mass needs in the following Six (6) sectors - EdTech, FinTech, Health-tech, Security & RegTech, Enterprise & MSME SaAS, and Digital Economy & Emerging Tech.
Marwah Sports is the sports arm of the Marwah Group, a 70-year-old enterprise headquartered in Mumbai, India, with business interests across commercial real estate, infrastructure, technology, and sports. A powerful blend of research, innovation, pragmatism, and intuition, Marwah Sports aims to create and add value to the Indian sports ecosystem, running thinQsport (India’s first dedicated sports innovation network), creating world-class sporting infrastructure, operating a full-suite consultancy across brand management and equity opportunities for brands, athletes and sportspersons, and investing in early-stage companies, with a portfolio of 40+ companies.
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