If you want be competitive as a provider of fantasy sport leagues, offering big cash prizes and allowing for roster changes is a good start.DraftKings has done just that, and the online gaming destination has quickly grown since being founded in 2012 by Matt Kalish, Jason Robins and Paul Liberman.
When first started, DraftKings offered a grand prize of $100,000 for its first NFL fantasy season. In the company’s recently held Fantasy Basketball World Championship, DraftKings awarded North Carolina resident Adam Goulet a $1,000,000 grand prize, the largest top prize in daily fantasy basketball history, according to a recent press release. This was only a portion of the $2 million in prize money given away on March 22nd in Las Vegas.
On April 9th, DraftKings plans to award another grand prize of $1 million to the winner of the Fantasy Golf Maker. This will be followed by a pay out of over $300,000,000 to winners projected for the coming fantasy baseball season and $1 billion in prizes for 2015. Quite impressive for a company just passing its third year.
Since its 2012 launch, DraftKings has raised $75 million in five rounds of funding from eight investors that facilitated its acquisitions of DraftStreet and DraftStar, according to Crunchbase.com. The investor group was comprised of The Rain Group, Redpoint Ventures, GGV Capital, Atlas Venture, BDS Venture Group, Jordan Mendell, Boston Seed Capital and Jason Robins.
