Three things to know about the French start-up Sorare, which has raised a record fund – LCI

French start-up Sorare, which uses emerging NFT technology to create a game for exchanging virtual football player thumbnails, has raised $ 680 million (€ 580 million) from investors from around the world whole this Tuesday, September 21. This is a new record for the tech sector in France, which will allow the company to further develop its already very popular model.

This Parisian start-up owes its success to an original idea: its creators, Nicolas Julia and Adrien Montfort, have revisited the famous model for exchanging Panini football player stickers by combining it with the emerging technology of NFTs, the “non-fungible tokens”.

In this game, users can buy and sell virtual images of players whose value depends on performance in real encounters. Each sticker is in reality a digital collector’s item whose identity, authenticity and traceability are in theory indisputable and inviolable, thanks to the so-called technology of the “blockchain”, used for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

There are several rarity scales for these thumbnails: the rarer they are, the more expensive they are and offer the best bonuses to players. A limited NFT of Lionel Messi at Paris Saint-Germain, distributed in 1000 copies, was purchased for 11,000 euros on Monday noon. The record is held by a single card from Cristiano Ronaldo, sold for $ 280,000.

The community claims more than 250,000 active players, of which between 30,000 and 40,000 have a player card in the form of an NFT. New users can experience the game with unlimited free cards.

With a valuation of 4.3 billion dollars (3.7 billion euros), the Parisian company founded in 2018 is now the first “unicorn” French, these start-ups not listed on the stock exchange but valued at more than a billion dollars. The goal of its founders: “Create the world’s first entertainment group in the world of sports”.

This Tuesday, September 21, Sorare broke a record in the tech sector in France, raising more than $ 680 million (580 million euros) during a fundraising campaign from investors around the world. “This amount allows us to focus on our product until a potential IPO within a few years”, announced its co-founder Nicolas Julia to AFP.

The company has never organized an advertising campaign, but it was able to rely on the fame of certain investors to gain visibility: the former player Gérard Piqué was the first to bet on the start-up in 2018 , followed by Rio Ferdinand, César Azpilicueta and Antoine Griezmann. In June, Griezmann bought the card “super rare” (edited in only 10 copies) by Kylian Mbappé, for the amount of 76,000 dollars.

Sorare recently announced a global partnership with Spain’s soccer premier and second division, which will allow him to “launch NFTs of all these players, thus creating new sources of income for La Liga clubs”. According to its founders, the Parisian start-up “aims to partner with the twenty best football leagues in the world by the end of 2022”.