Sports media company Minute Media has announced the closing of a $15 million financing round, bringing its total funding since it was founded to $60 million. The proceeds will boost Minute Media’s global expansion into new markets, introduce new sports brands, and expand the team across the company’s London, New York, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Singapore, Manila and São Paulo offices. The round was led by Qumra Capital, joined by Minute Media’s existing investors Battery Ventures, Dawn Capital and ProSieben.
Minute Media, founded by CEO Asaf Peled, Gili Beiman and Yuval Larom, is the parent company of soccer fan platform 90min and American sports fan 12up.
Minute Media allows fan journalists to share their passion for the game with millions of other fans by creating articles, quizzes, slideshows, videos, listicles and other rich multimedia content to tell the stories behind the game, integrating sports in to pop culture.
Through its worldwide contributor network and authentic fan-generated content, Minute Media delivers 20,000 pieces of original, socially-driven content to over 70 million unique users a month in 11 languages across Europe, the US, Latin America and South East Asia.
Following the success of 90min, Minute Media launched 12up, a new American sports brand targeting the US consumer arena in May 2016. The audience growth has catapulted Minute Media to be the third largest sports property in the UK and the ninth largest in the US in less than eight months, according to comScore for the month of December. Accentuating Minute Media’s global approach to audience development, the company is also firmly positioned as a top ten sports property in Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam, as per comScore’s reporting.
Peled said, "We are very excited about 2017 and look forward to cementing our growing position in the sports media industry and to developing our platforms towards the 2018 World Cup in Russia as well as launching a new unique esports platform."
Qumra Capital managing partner Boaz Dinte said, "For more than a decade the publishers all over the world are undergoing major upheaval following the passage of the written press to online media, we believe that Minute Media will become the world leader in the sports world in general, particularly for millennial generation, an attractive audience for all the advertisers and publishers Minute Media are targeting."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on February 14, 2017
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