Are you a sports fanatic who has at some point wished for creating a dream team comprising of your favourite sports players? Then Dream11 is perfect for you!
Dream11 is an online platform where players can indulge in fantasy games such as cricket, football, hockey, kabaddi and basketball. Users can create virtual teams with real-life players to play the fantasy league. The user earns points based on how well the players are performing during the actual game. A user who scores the maximum points attains the first rank on the leaderboard.
It all began in 2008 when the online fantasy league platform was co-founded by Harsh Jain and Bhavit Sheth. Both of them have been fans of Manchester United and the Indian Cricket Team so they combined their love for gaming, technology and sports to come up with this incredible platform.
Without a doubt, cricket is the most popular sport in India. Keeping that in mind, a number of campaigns have been carried out that caters to the liking of such a massive audience. In 2012, they introduced ‘freemium’ fantasy sports in India for cricket fans where they enjoy single-match games between teams. It turned out to be quite a game-changer for the online fantasy league gaming platform. After that, the success rate scaled higher and higher on the graph.
In 2017, the company had even signed commentator Harsha Bhogle as their first brand ambassador. Then in 2018, Cricketer & Ex-Indian Captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni replaced Harsha Bhogle as the brand ambassador of Dream11.
In March 2019, BCCI announced Dream11 as the Official Partner for the VIVO Indian Premier League. The four-year exclusive partnership started with IPL 2019 season. Additionally, the ‘Official Fantasy Game’ of IPL was also powered by Dream11. It signed up seven cricketers and partnered with seven Indian Premier League franchise as part of its multi-channel marketing campaign. Fans of the sport could log on to the app and create IPL teams based on who was slated to play that day. Then, depending on how the match played out, it affected the leaderboard of the fantasy game.
In April 2019, Dream11 became the first Indian gaming company to enter the ‘Unicorn Club’ which is a privately held start-up company which unique start-ups and recognises their incredible rate of success, a statistical rarity indeed. That same year, Dream11 was recognised as one of the top 10 innovative companies in India by Fast Company.
The incredible minds and team of Dream11 also set up the Dream11 Foundation which endeavours to help those in their hour of need. Recently, Dream11 Foundation pledged Rs.3 crores over a period of 3 years to support IFSG’s athlete support programme, ‘Stars of Tomorrow’. This is done to enable and support athletes in their sporting goals and dreams.
Dream11 has come a long way since its inception in 2008. It’s available as an app on Android and iOS mobile phones as well. Dream11 has achieved a number of milestones in the last few years and there’s a lot more to achieve in the future!