Eksab, an Egyptian fantasy football platform, announced that it has raised $3million in a funding round led by 4DX Ventures with participation from Darwazah Capital, Golden Palm Investments, P1 Ventures and some other angel investors.
Eksab was founded in 2018 by CEO Aly Mahmoud to make football more exciting and interactive for football fans through gaming and online community building. According to FIFA, football is the most popular and watched sport globally with over five billion football fans.
Eksab says it intends to use this investment to grow its user base across Middle East and Africa. Some of the funds will be deployed to beefing up its product and engineering teams and executing partnerships with football clubs.
Mahmoud said he was inspired to set up Eksab while he worked at a startup incubator in Canada. According to him, there were other fantasy football platforms like Dream 11, DraftKings and fanDuel and he wondered why there was no major one in Middle East and Africa.
“During my time there as well, I got exposed to the rise of DraftKings and FanDuel. My friends were playing these two games and while I didn’t know much about Canadian sports, specifically hockey, I found that playing these games was the easiest way for me to kind of get to know the sports and kind of develop that sense of camaraderie with my friends,” said Mahmoud.
“I enjoyed the games and realised ‘why is no one doing this for the hundreds of millions of football fans in the Middle East and Africa,?’” he said. “So we did some research and realised there was a massive market gap for this kind of game [fantasy football] in the Middle East and Africa.”
Eksab says it currently has over 700,000 users in Egypt on its platform who play daily, weekly and monthly fantasy and predictions contests. In its prediction games, users create fantasy lineups and participate in free or premium competitions. There’s a leaderboard to show how well they perform; winners get cash and other prizes.
The company claims that its user base makes over a million ‘picks’ each month and since the launch of its premium competitions in 2021, its paying user base has increased an average of 60% month-on-month.
Eksab’s vision is to have a fully integrated platform that will see it become the go-to platform for football play-to-earn gaming, content, stats, NFTs, digital collectibles and merchandise.
Mahmoud says Eksab is the only licensed fantasy football platform in Egypt and it hopes to acquire licenses to operate in three new markets before the end of this year. He said the company will be signing a partnership with one of the biggest football clubs in the Middle East and Africa.
