After raising $80 million from investors like Drake and Jeff Bezos, the company now has an estimated valuation upwards of $250 million.
Less than two weeks ago, Overtime snagged headlines and captured imaginations in announcing that Kevin Ollie, a longtime NBA veteran and national champion coach at UConn, had joined its upstart Overtime Elite basketball league as its first head coach and director of player development.
Given OTE’s unique intentions not only to pay six-figure salaries to high school basketball players aged 16 to 18, but to provide training related to finance, entrepreneurship, and social media, Ollie’s arrival was a major moment for athlete empowerment.
And on Thursday, on the heels of all that momentum, Overtime had more news to share: $80 million in Series C fundraising, enough to ratchet up the company’s estimated valuation to a quarter of a billion dollars.
“Over the past year, Overtime’s growth and scale have continued to accelerate on every front,” co-founder Zack Weiner told Boardroom. “It’s a super-exciting time for all of us.”
$250 million is a serious number for a company that Weiner and Dan Porter founded just five years ago.
Led by Sapphire Sport and Black Capital, the broader list of Series C investors includes some heavy hitters, from Drake to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian — as well as an ever-expanding list of current and former NBA stars whose perspectives Weiner credits as critical to shaping Overtime’s growth.
“[Kevin Durant] was one of our earliest investors, and a year later he was joined by Carmelo Anthony, Victor Oladipo, and Baron Davis. And now, we add another 25 NBA stars to the team, including Devin Booker, Trae Young, Pau Gasol, Zach LaVine, and many more,” he said. “They are excited to be part of something that can help these young men through amazing basketball development, customized education, and true economic empowerment… [T]hey were excited to have a chance to help shape the league from the very beginning, and create new options for the generation of players who will follow them into the [NBA].”
With the new $80 million infusion, the company intends to prioritize building out Overtime Elite with a group of 30 players, upwards of 40 coaches, and a full suite of educational resources. OTE isn’t the only beneficiary of these added funds, however. Overtime also intends to use the opportunity to branch out into new worlds, including sports betting and non-fungible tokens.
“This new investment gives us fuel to go to the next level. Back in February, we launched our own sports betting show, centered around our Pro Sports Betting League. It truly opened up a runway for us to explore this avenue and see how else we can break into this space,” Weiner said. “Overtime is at the epicenter of content [both] social and digital, so by incorporating NFTs and sports betting into the mix, there are truly endless possibilities for what we can do as a brand.”
Porter noted via The Wall Street Journal that Overtime’s vast, exclusive library of highlight videos places it in a unique position to offer NFTs in the spirit of not just trading cards, but the wildly popular NBA Top Shot. With that in mind, an advance into crypto collectibles is a logical next step for the organization.
Subscribe for the biggest stories in the business of sports and entertainment, daily.
Despite massive disruptions across the sports world related to the coronavirus pandemic, Overtime reported approximately doubling its year-over-year revenue from 2019 to 2020. And with these ambitious expansions in the works, there’s every reason to believe that ’21 will be far and away the biggest yet.
“We think there are some really exciting ways to leverage content and community in a way that’s engaging for our audience,” Weiner told Boardroom. “Stay tuned for more.”
