Dream11 is India's Biggest Sports Gaming platform with five crore+ users playing Fantasy Cricket, Football, Kabaddi, Basketball & Hockey. Fans can create their own team made up of real-life players from upcoming matches, score points based on their on-field performance and compete with other fans. Dream11 helps sports fans increase their engagement and connect deeper with the sport they love by being a team owner, not just a spectator.
An idea that sprouted in a spontaneous conversation between two college friends has grown into one of the world's most outstanding fantasy sports enterprises. Harsh Jain and Bhavit Sheth created Dream11, a pioneer in the Indian fantasy sports market, in 2008. Because the co-founders were avid followers of English football fantasy leagues, it began as a personal endeavour. Their grand plan was to create a sports league similar to the Indian Premier League (IPL). Sheth, an engineering graduate, would look at how fantasy leagues are played in the United States—in baseball, football, and basketball—while pursuing his MBA at Bentley University. Jain, a co-founder, has a bachelor's degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a master's degree in business administration from Columbia Business School.
Dream11 provides a fantasy gaming platform for multiple sports such as cricket, football, basketball, kabaddi, hockey, volleyball, handball, and baseball. It is an online game where users create a virtual team of real-life players and earn points based on the performances of these players in actual matches. A user who scores the maximum points in their joined contests attains the first rank on the leader-board. Dream11 offers free and paid contests. A user has to pay a certain fee to join a contest and can win real cash. To participate in a Dream11 game, a user must be at least 18 years old and needs to get their profile verified using their PAN. In 2017, the company partnered with three leagues within cricket, football, and basketball. Dream11 became the Official Fantasy Partner for Caribbean Premier League, Indian Super League, and US professional basketball league National Basketball Association (NBA). Later in the year, they partnered with the Indian Super League as their official Fantasy Football Partner. In November 2017, the NBA launched a fantasy basketball game associated with Dream11 and launched their official NBA fantasy game on their platform.
In 2018, Dream11 announced its partnership with (International Cricket Council), Pro Kabaddi League, International Hockey Federation (FIH), WBBL, and BBL. In 2018, through the above partnership, Dream11 introduced two new games on their platform, viz., kabaddi and hockey.
In October 2019, New Zealand Cricket (NZC) announced Dream11 as the title sponsor for the Super Smash domestic Twenty20 competition.[30] In January 2021, this partnership was extended for another six years until 2026. On 18 August 2020, Dream11 won the title sponsorship rights for the 2020 Indian Premier League for ₹ 2.22 billion after Vivo pulled out for the season.
Dream11, India's Biggest Sports Game, announced that it is now India's first gaming platform to integrate and adopt the WhatsApp Business solution. Dream11 users can opt for getting notifications and instant alerts on WhatsApp with this integration.
By using the WhatsApp Business API, Dream11 aims at strengthening user experience and engagement by providing real-time updates and information. Dream11 plans to use the WhatsApp Business API to communicate product updates, customer queries, and exclusive offers, starting with withdrawal updates.
It took the company four years to figure out the one thing the platform wanted to do — build the stock market equivalent of fantasy sports. The validation came from multiple YouTube channels where self-proclaimed gurus gave advice on how to win on Dream 11, and books and tuition classes taught how to pick the right team. The parent company of Dream 11 has also launched a $250 million venture fund, Dream Capital, in August 2021 to back startups in sports, gaming, and fitness. It has backed the likes of sports content and commerce platform FanCode, sports experience platform DreamSetGo, apart from an astroturf company, esports venture, sports fan token company, and fitness platform Fittr. The perennial-planner will be focused on growing Dream Sports to make the sports experience better for fans by driving personalization.
Lower Parel in Mumbai isn't the first place that comes to mind when thinking of technology startups. However, Dream11, India's newest Unicorn, is located on the 19th floor of a high-rise that houses banks, media businesses, stockbrokers, and corporations.
A digital scoreboard sits just over its little reception gate — the side that employees see as they leave the company – and displays the number of registered users Dream11 has. The figure was 52.5 million on March 14th. According to co-founder and CEO Harsh Jain, the company has set a goal of reaching over 100 million users by the end of 2019, which will be a fourth of the 400 million Indians who watch cricket online. The ambitious goal is likely to be met chiefly during the Indian Premier League (IPL), with the cricket World Cup serving as a cherry on top.
It will be especially important for Dream11 because the company's mobile app is not available on Google's Play Store. Because Google does not allow mobile apps that offer cash prizes on its platform, this is the case. As a result, the program must be downloaded from the company's website, with a warning that doing so may be dangerous.
Despite this, Dream11 has managed to pique the curiosity of consumers and elite investors from all around the world. The corporation is averse to discussing money raisers. It hasn't disclosed any of its financing rounds, including the $100 million it received from Chinese internet behemoth Tencent last year at a valuation of around $700 million, which any other internet business would trumpet about. However, the data speak for themselves. According to an investor briefing on the company, Dream11 expects total platform transactions of around $650 million for the year ending March, with net revenue of $100 million, based on the approximately 15% service fees it charges.
