Aiming to enhance its technology and expand its footprint across the nation, sports tech startup Play Your Sport has raised an undisclosed pre-Series A funding from a bunch of investors led by Ashish Gupta, a former chief operating officer of Evalueserve.
The funding will also be used to ramp up its team. It looks to hire over 50 people across functions in the next six months, co-founder Supriya Mamgain.
The Delhi-based startup had raised $16,000 in seed funding from Hyderabad Angels in January 2015 after it was elected among the five startups which were selected for funding at ‘Startup Heroes’ organised by TIE’s Hyderabad chapter. The startups had to dilute around 8% stake in exchange.
Founded by Mamgain and Varoon Kapoor, Play Your Sport is operated by Supruk Fitness and Tech Pvt Ltd. It is a location-based mobile app that lets users discover sports and fitness centres in the neighbourhood, connect with other sports enthusiasts and read about their favourite teams across different sports.
It is currently present in Delhi and Mumbai. The company has around 2000 venues listed on its platform. The platform charges a membership fee to sports clubs, academies and fitness centres on its platform.
With so many sports leagues concerning football, badminton, tennis, kabaddi and boxing introduced in India, The country is once again discovering its enthusiasm for different sports. Not just as fans cheering professional sportspersons, they are now trooping into the field to play their favourite sports.
Mamgain said, “Currently, the total market size is over 100 million and our goal is to target the 20 million in the metro cities in the 18-49 years age group.”
There has been a considerable rise in startups that bring stadia, coaches and equipment closer to the ordinary citizen. Play Your Sport competes with goSporto, Playo, BookMySports, OyePlay, Athletto among others. In March this year, goSporto raised $30,000 (Rs 20 lakh) in seed funding from Singapore-based angel investor Naveen Gupta. Former Flipkart executive Ankit Nagori is also gearing up to launch his sports tech startup.
Mamgain has worked with HDFC Standard Life Insurance before starting Play Your Sport. Kapoor has earlier founded Caravan Cabs – a portal that allowed users to compare price and expected a time of arrival for multiple cab aggregators such as OlaCabs, Uber, Taxi for Sure, Meru, etc.
