Challenger, an esports betting platform, has participated in a second seed investment round led by SeventySix Capital. The investment will be used to allow the company to expand its product beyond desktop gaming and on Xbox and PlayStation consoles along with new content, competitive features, and other complementary initiatives that would create a strong foothold for the firm’s product and strike home with gamers and bettors.
Expanding the Platform Experience on Challenger
SeventySix Capital has not disclosed any financial information nor has Challenger. Nevertheless, Challenger’s betting platform is unique in several aspects of its offer. Instead of betting on esports contests outright, the platform seeks to allow you to bet on your own performance in a video game. This was first introduced by Unikrn with its UMode betting but has been quickly taken up as a separate betting vertical.
Players play against each other and bet real money by creating challenges for others that they then need to complete. The platform supports a range of games, but it’s planning to expand with more. The present titles backed by Challenger are Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, but it will be adding more, such as Call of Duty, PlayerUnknown’s Battleground, and Fortnite to name a few.
Commenting on this financial round, Challenger founder and CEO Chris Slovak said that the mass market for video games still limits skill-based participation and this is what Challenger is looking to resolve. In Slovak’s estimate, there are 300 million gamers in Europe and North America alone, and they are interested in cash-based contests.
Challenger Set to Define Betting on Video Gaming Contests
“Challenger was launched to overcome this problem,” Slovak concluded. Meanwhile, SeventySix Capital managing partner Wayne Kimmel argued that his company felt confident about the future of Challenger and the way the platform has been able to create a sustainable ecosystem of cash contests on esports.
Challenger also taps into an expansive dataset on gamer behaviors, Kimmel noted, and he argued that the firm would have no trouble “overcoming cross-platform, cross-game and cross-studio esports wagering” differences.