#Asia Indian sports engagement platform Rooter raises funding from Intex; expanding to Southeast Asia

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Rooter connects sports fans around the world and engages them through a live match prediction game

Rooter Co-founder Piyush Kumar (L) and Intex's Keshav Bansal

Rooter Co-founder Piyush Kumar (L) and Intex’s Keshav Bansal

Rooter, a digital platform that connects, engages and helps audiences interact with each other on a real-time basis during sports events, has raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Intex Technologies, a leading consumer electronic goods and accessories manufacturers in India.

The capital will be utilised to strengthen the tech team (tech, content, and sales & marketing). Additionally, this will help accelerate the platform’s expansion into Southeast Asian markets and catalyse partnerships with sports teams and leagues all around the world.

The startup has earlier raised funding from Dhruv Chitgopekar and Prantik Dasgupta. Well-known Bollywood star Boman Irani is also an investor in the startup.

Also Read: There is a hero in all of us: Fantasy sports app SportsHero launches with a US$2.4M funding

Based out of Delhi, Rooter connects sports fans around the world and engages them through a live match prediction game. Fans create their rooter profile with teams/players they support and get a ‘passion score’ basis their social media engagement. The live match prediction game engages fans through matches with predictions based on stats and also allows them to interact in ‘live match chat forum’.

Rooter currently covers football, cricket, tennis and basketball. With the approaching sports season, Rooter hopes to exceed the 50,000 downloads it currently sits on, and aims to cross half a million downloads by the end of IPL, the most popular cricket league in India.

Rooter will benefit from the state-of-the-art technological setup of Intex, access to which can help reduce Rooter’s R&D costs. The ready database of Intex will also be a goldmine for Rooter to find new users.

Said Piyush Kumar, Founder and CEO, Rooter: “Rooter is essentially a tech-based platform and we wanted to have an investor on board who could also be our strategic partner and help us evolve our product to fully realise its potential. Intex’s deep understanding of the smartphone world and its popularity in Tier-2 and 3 cities of India will help us to promote and develop Rooter’s unique idea further, optimising it to perfectly fit the needs of smartphone users everywhere.”

The average time spent by a user on Rooter has gone up from 2-3 minutes in September last year to 13-15 minutes currently. The number of daily active users is also growing at a brisk pace, with Rooter looking to engage more than 20,000 daily active users by the time IPL starts.


Image Credit: Rooter

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