The funding round was led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, with participation from B Capital.
The newly raised capital will be used to fund the expansion of the company’s metaverse across the cricket landscape for current and emerging partners.
Mirae Financial, Tiger Global, Coatue Management, Sequoia Capital India, Courtside Ventures, and Cristiano Ronaldo’s CR7 also invested in the round, which is touted as one of the largest Series A rounds in Asia.
FanCraze is building the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) official NFT ecosystem to deepen fans’ love of the sport.
“NFTs are fast becoming a movement and are enabling a direct relationship between all types of IP owners and their fans. NFTs represent culture and FanCraze is building an experience that would enable fans to collect cricket NFTs, engage with play-to-earn games and utilities, and own digital land,” said Anshum Bhambri, chief executive officer of FanCraze.
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“Cricket is one of the most popular sports in the world and FanCraze has quickly become the leader of cricket digital collectibles and NFTs, especially with their exclusive partnership with the ICC,” said Deven Parekh, MD, Insight Partners. “FanCraze’s co-founders, Anshum and Sundar, are best-in-class and we look forward to partnering with the FanCraze team as they continue to rapidly scale up and grow.”
The company plans to use the proceeds to integrate new sports relationships and to accelerate the growth of its global team, R&D lab, user experience team, gaming studio, and marketplace platform where fans can buy, trade, and craft their NFTs.
Funds will also be used to scale the company’s engineering, marketing, and customer success teams as the company expands its tech-centric offering to build the overall fan experience.
“We are thrilled to back FanCraze, which is augmenting the power of NFTs to give higher freedom, economic incentives, and thrill to fans. It can become a powerful mechanism to onboard new users in the Web3 space, where we have made multiple investments in the past,” said Kabir Narang, founding general partner at B Capital.
The company’s current partners include the ICC, Cricket West Indies (CWI), and cricketers including Rohit Sharma, Jasprit Bumrah, Muthiah Muralidaran, Jonty Rhodes, Shikhar Dhawan, Andre Russell, Ravichandran Ashwin, and Yuzvendra Chahal.
