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GAMURS, the company behind esports website Dot Esports, has closed a $3.5m funding round, led by Aura Funds Management.
The money is earmarked to “expand games coverage” and “go global”. GAMURS was started by founder Riad Chikhani when he was a teenager, and the company acquired Dot Esports in late 2016. They’ve set themselves a target of 10m monthly active users by the end of 2018, and are already looking at hitting 4.5m by the end of 2017.
The next step could be expansion into Asia, to take advantage of the giant esports audiences in South Korea and China. The story was broken by AFR, who reported that Riad Chikhani stated “he had chosen to take Aura on as an investor because of its connections to Asia.”
"The market has seen rapid growth and every year the projections are well below what actually happens," Chikhani told AFR. "The basic eSports games like League of Legends, Counter-Strike and Dota are starting to hit their maximum viewership, but more game publishers are focusing on bringing an eSports side to the games they’re developing.
"More fans will be created organically because the games they love will become eSports titles and we think there will be between 700-800 million viewers in the next few years."
