Exclusive: Play Your Sport raises funding from ex-Evalueserve COO Ashish Gupta

Sports tech startup Play Your Sport has raised pre-Series A funding from a bunch of investors led by Ashish Gupta, former chief operating officer of Evalueserve.

The funding will be used to ramp up its team, strengthen technology, and expand its footprint across the nation. The company plans to hire over 50 people across functions in the next six months, co-founder Supriya Mamgain told TechCircle.in. She, however, declined to reveal the amount of pre-Series A funding raised.

Operated by Supruk Fitness and Tech Pvt Ltd, the Delhi-based startup had raised $16,000 in seed funding from Hyderabad Angels in January 2015.

Hyderabad Angels had made the funding commitment at the 'Startup Heroes' event organised by TiE's Hyderabad chapter. Play Your Sport was among five startups which were selected for funding. The startups had to dilute around 8% stake in exchange.

Founded by Supriya Mamgain and Varoon Kapoor, Play Your Sport is a location-based mobile app that lets users discover sports and fitness centres in the neighbourhood, connect with other sports enthusiasts and read about their favourite teams across different sports. Currently present in Delhi and Mumbai, the company has around 2000 venues listed on its platform. The platform charges a membership fee to sports clubs, academies and fitness centres on its platform.

Mamgain worked with HDFC Standard Life Insurance before starting Play Your Sport while Kapoor has earlier founded Caravan Cabs – a portal that allowed users to compare price and expected time of arrival for multiple cab aggregators such as OlaCabs, Uber, Taxi for Sure, Meru, etc.

With the rise of sports leagues across football, badminton, tennis, kabaddi and boxing, Indians are discovering their enthusiasm for different sports. Not just as fans cheering professional sportspersons, they are now trooping into the field to play their favourite sports. "Currently, the total market size is over 100 million and our goal is to target the 20 million in the metro cities in the 18-49 years age group," said Mamgain.

Several startups that bring stadia, coaches and equipment closer to the ordinary citizen have come up in India. Play Your Sport competes with goSporto, Playo, BookMySports, OyePlay, Athletto among others. Meanwhile, former Flipkart executive Ankit Nagori is also gearing up to launch his sports tech startup. In March this year, goSporto raised $30,000 (Rs 20 lakh) in seed funding from Singapore-based angel investor Naveen Gupta.

Gupta has earlier invested in educational products aggregator Fastudent.

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