THE HISTORY OF SORARE
2022
Introduction Sorare Baseball and Sorare Basketball.
October 2021
In Oct. 2021, Sorare signed a partnership with the German Bundesliga and the 2nd Bundesliga. The company also announced the release of Sorare NFT Moments. A way to buy a specific highlight in a game as an NFT. Bundesliga Moments will be released in 2022.
September 2021
In September 2021, Sorare raised a $680m Series B at a valuation of $4.3bn. Led by Softbank and with participation from existing investors Accel, Headline and Benchmark, as well as new investors such as IVP, Atomic, Bessemer and Eurazeo. At the time, Sorare had 600,000 registered users, 150,000 MAUs (buying a ticket or building a team), was already working with 180 football clubs and had generated more than $150m in revenue by 2021.
August 2021
On 21 August, Sorare introduced Limited Cards, a new type of rarity tier to make the game more accessible to new players. Each season, a thousand limited cards are minted for each player in Sorare (compared to 100, 10 and 1 for the other rarity tiers).
July 2021
In July 2021, Sorare announced that it had implemented a new scaling solution on Ethereum called Starkware to avoid massive gas fees and long transaction times. On 21 July, Sorare released a dynamic reward system that links the number of rewards to the number of players in a given game week.
June 2021
In June 2021, Sorare announced partnerships with several national teams during the Euro 2021 tournament (including France, Belgium and Germany).
March 2021
In March 2021, Sorare launched the One-Shot League in collaboration with Ubisoft, a third-party game where you can use Sorare cards. This game has different rules: You have 25 players who can only be used once in a team during 5 different matches. This game no longer exists because it did not have enough appeal.
February 2021
In February 2021, Sorare raised $50 million in Serie A, led by Benchmark and with participation from Accel and angels such as Antoine Griezmann, Rio Ferdinand, Oliver Bierhoff, Alexis Ohanian and Gary Vaynerchuck.
July 2020
In July 2020, Sorare raised a $4m seed round led by Headline with participation from Partech, Fabric Ventures, Semantic Ventures and Cygni. At that point, Sorare already had 70 football clubs on board (including Juventus, Atletico Madrid and Olympique Lyonnais) and had been in beta since March 2019.
April 2020
In April 2020, Sorare migrated its infrastructure from Loom to Ethereum to reduce its dependence on Dapper Labs (the developer of Loom, which also owns direct competitor NBA Top Shot) and to be in an ecosystem with many Layer 2 solutions to solve blockchain scalability problems.
May 2019
In May 2019, Sorare raised €500,000 in a pre-seed round with Seedcamp, Kima, Consensys and business angels.
october 2018
In October 2018, Sorare announced that it had signed its first partnership with the Belgian football league.
September 2018
In September 2018, Nicolas Julia (CEO) and Adrien Montfort (CTO) co-founded Sorare. Adrien Montfort was previously VP Engineering at Stratum, where he built and led a team of 10+ blockchain engineers. Nicolas Julia was previously VP Operations at Stratum, where he scaled operations and made large business deals.
The growth of Sorare can be divided into three phases:
September 2021: Sorare goes mainstream
After the switch to Starkware was complete, Sorare released Limited cards, a new rarity that made the game more accessible. Partnerships with LaLiga and Bundesliga are announced, and new types of NFTs are released: Sorare Legends and Sorare Moments. Finally, the record funding of 680 million dollars was announced. Sorare closed October 2021 with €17.5 million in primary market sales, reaching an all-time high. This is 35x more than in October 2020.
February 2021 - September 2021: The launch
Sorare has made the blockchain invisible by integrating Ramp, which allows users to buy cards with their credit card. A major funding of $50 million was announced at the same moment that the NFT industry experienced its first boom. The number of paying users increased from less than 5000 in February to 30'000 in September.
2018 - 2020: Foundation and growth phase
The user base grew slowly as the product was built up. Most Sorare users gradually became highly engaged users, with 45% of paying users being owners of at least 10 Sorare Cards. Sorare has signed big clubs: Juventus FC, Bayern, PSG, Real Madrid and Liverpool.