Cristiano Ronaldo backs cricket NFT company
According to individuals familiar with the case, an online marketplace for selling officially-licensed digital cricket items is raising nearly $100 million in a major fundraising round with investors including Cristiano Ronaldo.
Cricket lovers would be pleased to learn that Cristiano Ronaldo’s firm CR7, along with a group of renowned worldwide investors, has invested $100 million (about Rs 760 crore) in FanCraze, a city-based cricket NFT company. This is projected to be one of the biggest series-A fundraising deals in Asia’s NFT industry.
According to the representatives, B Capital Group and Insight Partners are leading FanCraze’s Series A financing. They wanted to stay anonymous because the information is confidential. The blockchain business, formerly known as Faze Technologies, has also attracted Mirae Asset from South Korea, according to the source.
Another source claimed that an announcement might come as soon as the next several weeks. Details of the fundraising, such as the magnitude, could vary as the process progresses, according to the sources.
B Capital, Insight, and FanCraze refused to clarify, while a spokesperson for Mirae Asset did not respond to a request for comment right away. An emailed request for a response after regular business hours was not immediately responded to by a media contact for Manchester United, Ronaldo’s football club.
Just last year, Stanford University alumnus and former investment banker Anshum Bhambri and two others co-founded FanCraze. The International Cricket Council, the sport’s official governing body, has partnered with the startup to produce special cricket non-fungible tokens on the Flow blockchain. According to FanCraze’s homepage, the marketplace and the first packs of NFTs were published in January.
The International Cricket Council (ICC) and Cricket West Indies (CWI) have already partnered with the firm as their official digital collectibles partner. The company has also registered high-profile Indian cricketers like Rohit Sharma, Jasprit Bumrah, Shikhar Dhawan, Ravichandran Ashwin, and Yuzvendra Chahal.
According to a press statement on Dapper’s website, FanCraze raised $17.4 million in seed funding headed by Tiger Global Management, with participation from Coatue and Sequoia Capital India, as well as Dapper Labs.