Sports news portal Floodlightz close to raising pre-Series A funding

Floodlightz.com, a multi-sports dedicated online platform, is in advanced talks with two investors to raise its pre-Series A round of funding, the company's co-founders told Techcircle.in.

"We are going to raise the money by the end of April from either of these two investors," said Sunil Kumar, co-founder of Floodlightz.

The company will use the funds to develop its mobile application called Pay-Per-Play which enables one to find out a gym or yoga centre or sports complex within a three-five km radius and engage in physical activities. A user can also subscribe to a monthly pass for all the centres listed on the app. In the recent past a number of similar startups have cropped up that essentially link users to gyms in the vicinity and some also provide users an over-the-top pass to use a set of them instead of being tied to one chain.

Kumar, an IIT Kharagpur alumnus, said the firm has tied up with several gyms and sports complexes, which mainly include badminton and tennis courts, in Delhi-NCR. The company will get a 10-15 per cent commission on every transaction done through the app, which will be launched in the first week of April.

Launched in February last year by Kumar and Nikhil Kapoor, the company primarily runs a portal through which it publishes sports centric stories, blogs and interviews. It also offers live scores and news updates on the lines of ESPNcricinfo and Cricbuzz. It claims to have 1 lakh-1.5 lakh viewership per month.

It also runs an ecommerce site through which it offers sports and gym equipment in bulk to schools and universities. Though Kumar declined to divulge the number of transactions, he said the firm gets most orders for tennis racquets, table tennis balls and shuttlecocks.

While Kumar has worked in the past with firms such as Trans Web Global Inc, Croak.it! and CSIR-NML; Kapoor, an GGSIP University alumnus, has worked with Casio, Skullcandy, Gear4 and Asvatha Pvt Ltd.

The company is more eager to concentrate on its content website and the mobile application. "We need a strong logistics partner and customer support to maintain our ecommerce site. At the moment, it doesn't seem scalable; so our priority would be the portal and the app," said Kapoor.

Kapoor said the company plans to provide live news updates of Euro Cup and Rio Olympics, which are scheduled to kick off by June and August, respectively, this year.

In the past, the space has witnessed some deals. Times Internet Ltd, the digital arm of Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd (parent of The Times of India and a host of other news properties), had acquired cricket news and information portal Cricbuzz.com from Bangalore-based Akuate Internet Services Pvt Ltd in 2014.

For more details on the proposed funding and investors, click here.