Fantasy Football Hub tech provider Scoreline nets funding boost

The sports technology group behind Fantasy Football Hub has scored a multimillion pound funding boost from a syndicate of investors.

Sky News understands that Scoreline, which counts the Sky Sports football pundit and former Manchester City defender Micah Richards among its investors, will announce a $6m (£4.5m) fundraising later this week. The funding round has been led by Nickleby Capital, a backer of the premium ticketing and hospitality platform Seat Unique.

Money blog: Big energy providers named among worst in new rankings Other participating investors include Dopamine Sports Ventures and Winforton Investments, according to the company. Scoreline uses AI to deliver subscriber-based content which provides fans with data, insight and analytics to aid management of their fantasy sports teams.

Its flagship product, FFH, focuses on English football's top flight and has 800,000 members, including 60,000 subscribers who pay to access more advanced services such as 'My Team', which features AI-inspired player recommendations. Scoreline is now launching Wickets.ai in a bid to capitalise on the rapid growth in demand for fantasy cricket.

The fantasy cricket market for the Indian Premier League (IPL) is said to attract more than 200 million players. "This funding lets us scale our AI-powered platform from football to a global audience across more sports, starting with cricket," said Dr Thomas.

"Our goal is simple: make fantasy easier, smarter, and more fun for every fan." The company cited research suggesting that fantasy sports players spend as much as seven hours each week researching their team selections, with more than half claiming to care more about their fantasy team winning than their real team. "Scoreline has proven you can generate valuable fantasy sports insights at scale," said Saav Shah, managing partner at Nickleby Capital.

"The combination of validated product-market fit, proprietary AI, and expansion into cricket makes this a compelling opportunity." According to figures referred to by Scoreline, the global market for fantasy sports games and content is expected to be worth $105bn by 2033..