iGB North America magazine IGBNA Aug/Sep | Page 37

Feature

the mainstream media that accept it, so the
dynamics of the business are very similar to
traditional fantasy sports. Like FanDuel, it is a
proven model being applied to a new industry.
Where has the financial backing/
investment for Vulcun come from?
It’s all VC. There’s no private equity. We have
raised a total of about $13.5 million, about
$1 million in about seed money when we
started, and the most recent round was $12
million led by Sequioa, the world’s leading
VC firm. It’s a really great group. As well as
Sequoia, there’s Matrix Partners, the partner
there being the co-founder of Betfair, Josh
Hannah. There’s partners from Google
Ventures in there, Joe Kraus. The CEO of
Zynga, Mark Pincus, is invested. Personally,
there’s the CEO of Kabam, another large
mobile gaming company, Kevin Chou, who is
part of the round. If you look at the website,
there’s some other great names in there.
These people really believe in the industry,
and they’re supporting us.
What are the main complexities
involved in pricing (i.e. setting player
salary costs) and scoring the fantasy
contests and leagues?
I think eSports is a lot harder to do than
traditional sports, because for football,
baseball or basketball, there’s mature
leagues and data sources. In the US, there’s
a company called Stats.com, which collects
and syndicates data for all sports leagues
for anyone who wants to buy them, so it is
very easy to get the data, populate fantasy
contests, set player salaries, award points. In
eSports, there are two issues, a) there is no
such company, and b) outside of one game,
the tournament structure is very unstable.
eSports is dozens of games, and if you decide
to support the Top 10, we have an entire
team dedicated to getting data, managing
data, inputting data, making sure the data is

correct. We don’t always get it right. We try to,
but it’s pretty chaotic.
How many tournaments do you cover
on an average day/week, and how do
you plan to expand this coverage over
the next 12 months?
Right now we are supporting five games,
League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone,
CS: GO and Call of Duty, and on any given
week, there’s somewhere between 12-15
tournaments running at the same time. Some
of them are just weekend events, Friday to
Sunday, others are longer-form leagues,
which might run for three months, with
maybe two days of games every week.

it makes things more stable. Legislators likely
want to regulate it and tax it, which obviously
creates more burden for any business
operating there, if they are accepting players
from that state. But then you don’t have the
risk of one state staying, “You know what,
we’re going to stop this.