Sleeper is a San Francisco-based fantasy sports app led by CEO Nan Wang. The platform hosts fantasy leagues covering the NFL, NBA, college basketball and League of Legends. The company emphasizes bringing people together through sports and gaming via its mobile app. Sleeper intends to use new funding to expand the game offerings on its platform and to build a Wallet feature that will enable users to sync their preferred payment methods. The company raised $40M in a Series C led by Andreessen Horowitz. The article did not disclose operating metrics such as revenue or user counts. Sleeper is a fantasy sports app focused on social, league-based competition where users draft athletes and compete head-to-head. The company is expanding into esports, launching support for League of Legends and staging its first international season. Users in the U.S., Europe, Vietnam, Korea and Brazil can participate in the upcoming fantasy season. Sleeper recently added voice chat, plans to add video chat, and says it intends to launch three new sports this year. The app has over 1 million active users and currently offers all services for free, with no immediate plans to change that. CEO Nan Wang says delayed and canceled arena sports seasons have pushed out timelines for generating revenue. Sleeper is a fantasy football app designed to make leagues accessible to casual fans, women, and social groups through simple, well-designed interfaces. The company consciously hired an all-female design team and staffers unfamiliar with fantasy sports to build a more inclusive product. Sleeper uses fantasy leagues and other forms of social competition to build a friend graph around sports and aims to strengthen bonds between friends, families, and co-workers. It reports user-base growth of between 700% and 900% year over year since launching beta in 2017, though it has not disclosed total users. Financially, Sleeper has taken on over $7 million in venture capital to date and says it is positioning itself to compete with incumbents like Yahoo and ESPN. Sleeper operates an app and website that lets sports fans hold channel-based conversations around teams, fantasy advice, and other topics. The product embeds chat throughout the experience and includes features to power in-person drafts. Starting with the NFL, Sleeper has added season-long fantasy sports inside the app, with other sports planned to roll out later in the year. The company reports hundreds of thousands of users and says average users open the app 4–5 times per day, spending 3–5 minutes per session (up to ~30 minutes on peak game days). Sleeper previously raised about $2M in seed funding from Birchmere VC and Expa. The offering is free for NFL fantasy this season.

Total raised

$67M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Sep 2021