ESPORTS CROWDFUNDING PLATFORM MATCHERINO RAISES $1.5M
TNL Take: California has been the center of innovation in both technology, Silicon Valley, and Gaming/eSports with over half the US industry based in that state.
Recently Seattle has seen it's own emergence of eSports startups: Unikrn - which is doing the first eSports ICO, Hubtag, Innervate and Beam, which was acquired by little local company Microsoft.
Last week another Seattle based eSports startup Matcherino raised $1.5M from previous investors Madrona Venture Group, Vulcun Capital and other angels.
Want another NBA eSports connection? Vulcun Capital is the investment arm of Vulcun Inc., run by ex-Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the owner of the Portland Trailblazers.
Matcherino is very simple way to crowdfund a prize pool between players, teams or events for a multitude of games.
Matcherino users simply login via Twitch, use PayPal as the transaction platform and the money goes directly to the prize pool.
Matcherino provides 2 additional benefits:
- Users who donate accrue points towards rewards redeemable for goods which are mostly T-shirts currently
- As Matcherino CEO Grant Farwell said: "Before us, the prize pools were being completely mismanaged by event organizers, who are often young due to the nature of the industry and don’t handle money well" [Note: That was not said by me. Don't @ me]
Matcherino also offers Sponsored rewards like Soylent, who also happen to invest in eSports.
By essentially just providing a connection layer and taking a % of each transaction and some sponsorship revenue, Matcherino could work.
However the biggest challenge is lack of defensibility: Twitch, YouTube, or Facebook could easily replicate this.
Let's see which platform copies this the quickest if the monetization opportunity is there.