In the furrow traced by Sorare, Unagi wants to speed up the pace.
This young French company specializing in "fantasy sports" games based on NFT announces a raising of 4.7 million euros, just a few months after having already obtained financing of 4 billion euros from Binance Labs, the fund investment platform from global giant Binance.
This new funding round was led by Sisu Game Ventures, a venture capital firm and veteran game industry entrepreneurs based in Finland.
Without giving figures, the start-up ensures that its valuation has more than doubled over the past six months, in a context of falling investor activity.
Created in June 2021 by former Ubisoft employees, the start-up released its first fantasy football platform in April 2022. Called "Ultimate Champions", it offers, like Sorare, a game based on player cards in the form of NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
Users create and manage their own sports teams, the results of which are calculated based on the performance of athletes in real life.
But the comparison stops there, according to the founders of Unagi.
"
We wanted to develop a different gaming experience, completely free, above all based on the pleasure of the game and we created our own token, which allows us to better control the game economy.
explains Rémi Pellerin, co-founder of Unagi.
Classic in the world of mobile gaming, the "earn to play" game model allows the best players in a competition to be rewarded with tokens.
At Unagi, these are tokens called “Champs”.
Arsenal and Basketball
To date, Unagi has signed partnership agreements with over 45 clubs, including Arsenal in the UK and VfL Wolfsburg and Bayer 04 Leverkusen in Germany.
It claims 220,000 users, including 70,000 monthly active users, which it hopes to double within six months.
The company will launch a second game based on basketball at the end of February, after having signed an exclusive partnership with the Euroleague.
“
Basketball will increase public interest in our platform and our token
hope the co-founders, who want to continue to open up to other popular sports.
But Unagi does not want to limit himself to sports.
"
We want to develop other games, become a true web 3 game creation studio and also offer other experiences around Ultimate Champions
."
explains Rémi Pellerin.
The fundraiser will allow the company to continue to develop and improve the "Ultimate Champions" product and to produce a new game that will have nothing to do with the first two.
For this, Unagi will increase its workforce to forty people, against 25 currently.
“
There are a lot of types of games
that are easily
accessible, fun,
to which we can apply all the interest and advantages of decentralization and the blockchain,
” explains Pierre Mattei, co-founder and creative designer of Unagi.
For players, the promise is - when the web 3 ecosystem is more developed - to be able to use the tokens and NFTs earned or purchased in a game in other games or for other services.
In the shorter term, the company needs money to establish new partnerships with clubs and sports leagues, and to expand the Ultimate Champions player base through marketing operations.
This last point is the sinews of war, as the competition sharpens in the field of web3 games.
.
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