Cairo-headquartered daily fantasy football platform, Eksab has secured a $3M Seed funding round, led by 4DX Ventures with participation from Darwazah Capital, Golden Palm Investments, P1 Ventures, and a number of strategic angel investors from the local and global sports and entertainment ecosystem. This round brings the company’s total investment to date to $3.7M and Eksab will deploy the capital to scale its user base across the MENA region and Africa, invest in product development, talent acquisition for engineering, product, and execute partnerships with a number of leading global football clubs.
Eksab was launched in Egypt in 2018 with a mission to make football more exciting and interactive for every fan in the Middle East and Africa, through gaming and online community building. Players can choose free or premium competitions, make predictions and choose line-ups, with winners climbing the leaderboard and winning cash and prizes. Currently, Eksab is the first and only licensed fantasy football platform in Egypt and plans to acquire additional licences to operate in three additional countries by mid-2022, in a bid to capture the lion’s share of the multi-billion dollar football ecosystem in the region, serving more than 500M football fans in the Middle East and Africa.
Eksab currently has over 700K registered users in Egypt on its platform who participate in daily, weekly and monthly fantasy and predictions contests, with its user base making over a million ‘picks’ each month. Since the launch of its premium competitions in 2021, Eksab has grown its paying user base by an average of 60% month on month. In addition, Eksab has already partnered with over 10 top-tier Egyptian football players and content creators and is rapidly becoming a house-hold brand name amongst football fans. As it invests further in its technology, Eksab is currently adding functionality to integrate with leading blockchain-based platforms to enable football fans to capitalise on Web 3.0’s increased speed and transparency.
Commenting on the round, Aly Mahmoud, Eksab Founder and CEO said, “This is a phenomenally high growth period in our business as we look to take our platform to new audiences. We are also really excited to have some leading global investors and partners join this round. The fact that our previous investors are all doubling-down on Eksab highlights the great effort the team has put in over the last 12 months and the massive opportunity in the sector. With the growth of Web3 and play-to-earn gaming, we see Eksab as being at the forefront of the digital transformation of football, content, community and gaming across Africa and the Middle East.”
With the new financing round, and with the 2022 FIFA World Cup taking place in the Middle East in November 2022 for the first time ever, the tailwinds behind Eksab are strong. As the leading daily fantasy platform regionally, Eksab is uniquely positioned to dominate the growing football gaming market in the region, using technology to connect football fans and build gaming communities, especially as it looks to secure exclusive partnerships with leading clubs in the Middle East & Africa.
Dan Marlo, Managing Partner at 4DX added “We have been consistently impressed by the growth Eksab has demonstrated over the past 12 months, powered by technology-backed innovation and unrivalled market knowledge, by Aly and his team. The football gaming market is enormous globally, but especially in MENA. Eksab has built a product and a community that has been rapidly growing in the MENA region but can easily scale across the continent – which fits 4DX’s investment ethos perfectly”.
