The launch of CrickPe comes ahead of the IPL season, slated to begin from March 31.
Ashneer Grover, co-founder and ousted CEO of fintech startup BharatPe, on Thursday took to Twitter to announce his next venture, CrickPe, a fantasy cricket platform.
This comes about a year after Madhuri Jain, his wife, and he incorporated their own firm Third Unicorn, based in Delhi. The name ‘Third Unicorn’ came after Grover helped scale up two companies —- Blinkit (formerly Grofers) and BharatPe -— and turned them into unicorns, or startups valued at or over $1 billion.
Jain and Grover later roped in Aseem Ghavri as their third co-founder. Ghavri had founded Code Brew Labs in 2013, an enterprise application development company, which had provided tech to BharatPe, the fintech firm started by Grover and Shashvat Nakrani, in its early days. While he had never met Grover back then, a cold message Ghavri sent to Grover recently landed him the role of a co-founder in Third Unicorn.
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“Biggest revolution in cricket since (the) Indian Premier League (IPL) —- (the) only fantasy game paying cricketers for performance! Where you win —- cricketer wins -— cricket wins!” Grover tweeted on Thursday night. According to CrickPe’s website, it is an app to play cricket online. Users can create a virtual team of the best in-form real players, join the contests, and earn points per their actual game performance.
Essentially, a user will earn higher points depending on how well their team players perform in a live match. The user will be allowed to make real-time decisions and “invest their intelligence and time throughout the game,” the website said. “The fantasy sports industry is booming, and CrickPe is unfurling the magic of online cricket across India,” it added.
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The launch of CrickPe comes ahead of the IPL season, slated to begin from March 31. CrickPe will compete against existing players in the space, which includes the likes of My11Circle, A23, PlayerzPot, Dream11, MPL and several others. The fantasy gaming space has, however, been under the regulators’ scrutiny, which aims to find balance between games of skill and gambling.
CrickPe plans to hire not more than 50 employees in total and will follow a flat hierarchy where no employees will have designations. FE had earlier reported that Grover’s next venture would be in the business-to-consumer (B2C) space and had already hired several employees. “At Third Unicorn, we want the people to play a 360-degree role. So, if required, a tech guy can go out and do marketing and vice-versa. People should be open to challenges,” Ghavri had told FE then.
