Fantasy sports site RotoHog secured $2 million in Series B funding from by VC funds Mission Ventures and DFJ Dragon. In 2007, the company received $7.8 million in Series A funding from DFJ Dragon, Mission Ventures, and others. Founded in 2006, RotoHog operates and develops custom branded fantasy sports games for clients such the NBA.com, LG Electronics, GoDaddy.com, Pro Football Weekly, and Turner Digital, among others. RotoHog previously received $1.8 million in seed and angel funding from Allen & Company, SCP Worldwide and StubHub founder and CEO Jeff Fluhr in 2006.
Rotohog is planning to use the funds to develop new technologies and products for partners and expand its client base, including looking to international markets. Rotohog’s product platform includes custom sports games, fantasy games developed for social networks, fantasy leagues and a branded sports market ticker.
Rotohog is doing similar things to social game developer VoxPop.tv, except in the sports genre. There is definite potential in engaging consumers on the web through branded contests and games, especially with sports.
Rotohog is a great company with a compelling business model and a leader in its market niche.
What I do not undertsnad however, is why DFJ Dragon got involved, as I thought they were supposed to invest only in China related plays. Except for David Wu, I don’t think there is much of a China connection … or am I missing something?
Of course you are missing something/everything. You have no clue… All your comments are spam – please go away.
@Smart Babes. RotoHog is planning to use the funding to expand its client base in international markets, including China.
The Chinese are huge soccer and basketball fans and the fantasy sports industry in China is in it’s infancy. Looks like a good move for DFJ Dragon to get in on the ground floor.
Thanks @ Cardinal
Breaking into China will be very difficult. Shanda, Tencent and other local players have established themselves very well, I am not sure how a new foreign entrant will be able to take on entrenched competitors here … while US$2 million may seem like a lot in the current SV VC climate, players like Tencent and Shanda collectively are generating that much in profit each day in China …
From India
Anjali Sen
Fellow TechCrunhers, don’t start nitpicking on her comments already! If you want to say something, stay on-topic! Don’t start whining. I am really disappointed to see this kind of mud slinging attitude here…
Crafty spammer…. Guys, “Eli R” = “Smart Babes”
Clueless fool!
rotohog is also run by the dude that won The Apprentice a few years ago. I wonder if Ivanka is COO
What exactly does this company provide for games? Is that a technology or a software? I did not understand what fantasy means in this business. I was thinking of fantasy computer game development.
They Provide a different angle of a free fantasy game, they have a nice business, if the regular Fantasy game in the like of Yahoo! ESPN and CBS are what is called “Full Fantasy game” where team owners can hold only one entity of a sports player and by that only perform trading among themselves in Rotohog team owners trade with the system, and there are multiple entities of each sports figure.
No big technology but still a nice business.
If you are looking for technology/innovation in this field you can take a look at http://www.onesesaon.com (they aren’t a Fantasy sports game but still pretty innovative), and a newcomer
in the name of http://www.playspex.com, (A Fantasy game where you Buy & Sell your players with the use of real money)
@fornls: in this context, fantasy means “pretend” or “make-believe” and is used to describe “fantasy sports”
http://en.wikip...i/Fantasy_sport
know this team well and am a believer in RH.
Last April, a sales rep (Ryan M) convinced me to put up Rotohog affiliate tags on my site. I tested it for a couple days but it wasn’t a good fit as other ads generated more revenue.
Anyways, they said I got them a couple dozen leads and at $3 a pop, the total amount was $129.
I saved the messages (yeah, hotmail, I know… they sent their original message to the WHOIS email, not the email that appears on the website… Lesson learned: don’t trust WHOIS crawlers):
http://img17.im...otohognopay.jpg
Maybe now with $2 million, they can afford to pay people that gave them users. $129 isn’t huge, but as with a mugging, it’s not the amount of money that was taken that’s important.
strange, but interesting
Nice article! Check out my site too at http://macmaniapodcast.com
Congratulations to Kelly Perdew and the team.
wonder why you covered this funding but not the other funding of the day – the omgpop $5mm raise. Seems very “un” objective and journalistically unethical. oh unless mike invested in the company… then you cover it.
MA has not invested in RH.
MA has not invested in RH.
PS: Wanted to say good post!
Dear Rotohog,
Problems with the Ultimate Fantasy Commissioner game at NBA.com continue. Currently in our league, PFC2, we have:
1) No opponents scheduled for this week
2) Have had no scoring updates since the conclusion of games last Wednesday (meaning our entire Period 7 matchups are incorrect in outcome)
3) Still can not see the overall fantasy points of a player available on the waiver wire (everyone has a 0.00)
4) Commissioner still can’t replace owners or reset position eligibility
5) Speaking of position eligibility, that has not been updated yet this season (as an example Thaddeus Young of the 76ers started at SF for the entire season so far, but still is not eligible there)
I can go on – suffice it to say that since the complete failure of the draft system for the month of October, the myriad “glitches” have made playing UFC this year a nightmare. Communication with those using the UFC this year has been terrible – no responses other than the auto-generated “we’ve received your feedback” email, no public postings on the UFC forum. Does your company have no desire to put out a quality product? Do you have absolutely no care for customer service?
Thank you for taking all the fun out of an interesting and functional game – any chance you will honor your obligation to provide a working product to the fans of the game?
Sincerely,
http://my.nba.c...geID=5800242942
Check out the second link, Mission Ventures link. It seems wrong.
What a Joke. As one “old” customer stated, “who wants to invest in a sinking ship…”
Not sure what is this site about, ultimately luring folks with a lottery…..not a business model that is compelling, waste of VC money. Look at their stats on compete and Alexa, they have been struggling….