Sorare have raised again, five years on from the $680 million Series B that SoftBank led at a $4.3 billion valuation in September 2021. This one is a lot smaller. Benchmark, Accel, Partech and Kibo Ventures put in tens of millions of euros, the two co-founders invested alongside them, and no valuation has been disclosed.
Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:
1) The raise 💰
2) Five years on from SoftBank 🕰️
3) The rebuild 🎮
4) Licences and the NBA 🏀
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The raise 💰
Nico Julia, Sorare’s co-founder and CEO, announced the round on X on 3 September 2026:
In it, he said:
“Three years ago, we started rebuilding Sorare from the ground up. It shows: net revenue grew 85% year over year in H1 2026, from more than 100 000 Managers who bought cards (above the levels of the 2021 wave). Growth by itself is not enough: we plan to be profitable again by the end of 2027.”
“We’re opening a new era and closed a new funding round, backed by @benchmark, @Accel, @PartechPartners and @KiboVentures. All four have backed Sorare for years. My co-founder @adrien_sorare and I invested alongside them.”
Julia told Maddyness it is an “eight-figure raise”, and said “The first tranche has just been finalized, and a second will follow in the coming weeks and months.”
The round pays for three things, according to Julia.
🎨 Sorare 27 card reveal in the coming days
🚀 New Arcade Set in early September
🏀 NBA returns in October”
For the uninitiated, Sorare sells officially licensed digital player cards as NFTs. You buy and trade the cards, put them into fantasy line-ups scored on real matches, and win rewards. Football is the core, with the NBA and MLB additional game modes.
[Psst. Nico came on the Sporting Crypto podcast in May 2025 to talk through the rebuild]
Five years on from SoftBank 🕰️
Sorare raised a €40 million ($50 million) Series A in February 2021, led by Benchmark, with Accel and angels including Antoine Griezmann, Rio Ferdinand, Alexis Ohanian and Gary Vaynerchuk. Cards traded had skyrocketed from $60,000 in January 2020 to $4.2 million in January 2021.
Seven months later, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the $680 million Series B at an eyewatering $4.3 billion post-money valuation, with Atomico, Bessemer, D1, Eurazeo, IVP and LionTree, and Benchmark, Accel and Headline returning.
Sorare have not been insulated from the NFT market collapsing, however, even if the platform reached mainstream usage with over 3 million registered users, per Maddyness, and had 150,000 monthly active users at the time of the Series B.
Indeed, when I last wrote about Sorare in September 2025, I proposed they had four options on the table
A token launch
Raise at a much lower valuation than $4.3 billion
Push to profitability
A sale of the business
That was following some rough, back-of-the-napkin EBITDA and revenue numbers, guesstimated from a mixture of onchain analytics and publicly disclosed, as well as leaked numbers from various publications.
This is a raise, most likely at a lower valuation, to push to profitability (in late 2027, per Julia’s estimations). So it’s a mix of 2) and 3).
The rebuild 🎮
Sorare’s push to profitability has come hand in hand with a rebuild of game mechanics. It centres around ‘Arcade’.
It’s free to play, so you don’t need to buy a card, and the aim is for those free players to buy cards for the paid competitions.
“Earlier this year, we launched our new Arcade game mode: a free-to-play, fast-paced and rewarding product that has been an absolute hit. A new generation of fans joined: over 1 million new users in the last 18 months.”
Sorare are aiming for €15 million to €20 million of net revenue from Arcade this year. Growth was 17% in the second half of 2025, per Maddyness, and then 85% in the first half of 2026. “We’ve regained a very strong growth momentum,” Julia told them, and on the World Cup, “We saw the wave coming, but the competition acted as the hoped-for catalyst.”
In November 2025, The Big Whale reported a redundancy plan covering about 35% of the workforce, which Maddyness put at about 30 of 110 positions. The New York office closed, and Julia told The Big Whale the aim was to “accelerate our return to profitability” and “simplify the organisation” by centralising in Paris.
He also said more than €500 million of contractual commitments with leagues, clubs and players had been renegotiated and/or withdrawn.
Maddyness reported in June 2025 that annual licensing costs had been cut by a factor of five while keeping most of their partners, with about €42 million of activity planned for 2025. Julia told The Big Whale in November 2025 he envisaged profitability by the end of 2026, which now has been pushed out to 2027 by Julia’s recent comments.
Licences and the NBA 🏀
Sorare’s licences still cover football, basketball and baseball. Former and current partners include the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, MLS, NBA, NBPA, MLB and MLBPA.
That Premier League deal ended at the close of the 2025/26 season, according to Fortune, and no renewal has been announced, after a reported £120 million four-year deal was signed in 2023.
Indeed, that contract expiry comes against a turbulent regulatory backdrop for the French unicorn, and there is currently a criminal investigation ongoing, as well as a trial for unlicensed gambling operations due to take place in June 2027. Sorare have pleaded not guilty to those charges, per the Irish News.
In January 2025, the National Crime Agency (NCA) in the UK obtained an order at Westminster Magistrates’ Court under the Proceeds of Crime Act, freezing £10,024,041 in a Barclays account in the name of The Football Association Premier League Limited.
The money in question was the first instalment of the Sorare Premier League deal.
The NCA said the order was “to prevent dissipation of the funds while the NCA investigates any potential links between those funds and alleged third-party criminality”. There is no allegation of wrongdoing by the Premier League, and Sorare told Fortune “Sorare is not the subject of an investigation by the National Crime Agency. The freezing order concerns funds held in an account which does not belong to Sorare.”
On 11 September 2026, Westminster Magistrates’ Court extended the freeze by four months at the NCA’s request, per The Independent, which reports that the NCA and Luxembourg authorities are investigating Sorare. District Judge Sam Goozee said the freeze was “necessary and proportionate to prevent dissipation of funds which are suspected to be the fruits of criminal conduct and enable proper investigation by the authorities”.
The judge found no suggestion that the Premier League “themselves engaged in unlawful conduct”.
The Luxembourg authorities are investigating Sorare at the same time, and no details of that investigation have been reported.
The Premier League are still owed £7.5 million from their deal, which is yet to be paid by Sorare, the court heard.
It remains to be seen whether or not Sorare have done anything wrong here, or whether it was a third party involved in the deal; however, there is undoubtedly a story to be told here, which I’m sure we will follow in the months and years to come.
To conclude:
Sorare, as a business, have serious baggage with these proceedings and their previous lofty valuation. That doesn’t mean it can’t still be a success, but balancing profitability with potential court fights and a waning licence portfolio leads me to believe that a sale is still likely in the next few years.
By the time Sorare are in court regarding unlicensed gambling operations, we’ll have finally seen GTA6 launch. All joking aside, Sorare was founded in 2018. Had a deal in place with the Premier League in 2023. After FTX crashed in late 2022. This created regulation in the EU (MiCA) in 2023 and 2024, and in the US with GENIUS, and likely soon with the CLARITY Act. Oh and in that time, Kalshi and Polymarket have helped prediction markets take a forecast 21% share of NFL wagering in the US this season, per Eilers & Krejcik Gaming via CNBC, and Kalshi are likely to be seen in the Supreme Court. We (the UK) definitely need to move faster to protect customers, of course, but also to not stifle innovation. Something I’m afraid we’ve done badly, especially in crypto, in a post-FTX world. Setting the NCA’s involvement aside for a second, because if there is wrongdoing there from Sorare, that will play out the way it needs to. But generally speaking, we need to do a better job with companies that don’t fit strictly into one regulatory box.
Sorare’s trajectory has gone from fantasy behemoth to niche player. This doesn’t mean it can’t succeed in that specific realm, but the world in which it is a DK/Fanduel style success is no longer a plausible one.
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