Photo Credit: Players’ Lounge
Players’ Lounge is a Brooklyn-based eSports platform where gamers can play video games against each other for prizes. Founded by Austin Woolridge and Zach Dixon, Players’ Lounge announced it has closed $3 million in funding and players can earn millions of dollars in prizes on the site every month.
Investors in this round include Drake (rapper), Strauss Zelnick (chairman and CEO of Take-Two Interactive), Marissa Mayer (Lumi Labs co-founder and former Yahoo CEO), Comcast Ventures, Macro Ventures, Canaan, Sinai Ventures, Chetrit Ventures, RRE, and Courtside Ventures (a venture capital fund focused on investing in sports technology companies backed by Dan Gilbert and Bruin Sports Capital — a PE firm backed by George Pyne).
“The idea came because Zach (my cofounder and college teammate on the Wesleyan University Soccer team) and I enjoyed LAN parties, an old-school term for a bunch of people hooking up consoles to TVs and gaming competitively together in the same room. We played a lot of FIFA, and we missed doing this post college. We decided to start hosting gaming nights at bars, where we people from across the tri-state area would come to play in a FIFA tournament. It was an easy sell to the bars — they had bingo and trivia to bring in patrons on a weeknight. Why not add gaming?” wrote Woolridge in a blog post. “We ended up growing to the point where we ran leagues and tournaments throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, San Francisco and Toronto. Players gathered for gaming three times a week in each city. If you haven’t been to an event like this, imagine the student bar in the hometown of a college during an away game — high energy, loud and dramatic. These events became the foundation for local communities of gamers. Many new friendships were made, including our CTO Dan who was the first attendee at our first ever event in Williamsburg.”
That is how the founders of the company discovered that there was a problem that was in need of being solved. As there was a massive market of casual, but competitive gamers — there was no infrastructure for them to compete in a simple way.
There are more than 350 million gamers above the age of 18 playing online and a small percentage of them are making a lot of money playing professionally. And there are millions of gamers watching professionals who want to make money playing video games also. Players’ Lounge helps solve this problem.
In November 2018, the company was accepted to Y Combinator. This changed the trajectory of the company. Specifically, Players’ Lounge grew ten times during their time there.
This year, Players’ Lounge is expanding its development team and will support more games. Plus the company is going to add streaming functionality and create new formats for their community to compete in.
