Investment funds Leta Capital, Cedar Fund, Titanium Investments and a group of individuals have invested $5.5M in the Israeli sports mobile application 365Scores.
"This is our first investment in a sports-related mobile app," Sergei Toporov, senior investment manager at Russia's Leta Capital, the lead investor in the deal, told SBD Global. "We see fans' high interest in using technology that allows them to follow the most recent sports events and communicate about it. We believe that 365Scores does this job perfectly."
According to Toporov, 365Scores aims to make info sports brands' top 5, with ESPN, SkySports and Yahoo. Sports being among the main competitors.
"365Scores' team has experience in working with large amounts of data, and that gives it an upper hand over competitors," Toporov said. "Similar apps from ESPN and SkySports are inferior to 365Scores in data collection and aggregation technology."
Toporov said that 365Scores is testing monetization models with various group of users, but investors do not expect the company to become profitable at this point, while it is still in development stages.
365Scores is available for iOS and Android devices and allows users to follow 1,000 leagues and more than 10,000 teams. The service operates in 20 languages and currently has more than 5 million users globally.
Vladmir Kozlov is a writer in Moscow.
