U.S. Investment Firms Lead $32 Million Series A Funding Round For Brazilian Daily Fantasy Sports Platform

RDP, which launched in 2019 and is only available in Brazil, claims it has 1.5 million registered users, triple the number it had a year ago. That growth and the likelihood that sports betting could become legal in Brazil as soon as this year attracted investor interest.

D1 Capital Partners, a New York investment manager, led RDP’s Series A round, which was co-led by Bullpen Capital of Menlo Park, Calif., Left Lane Capital of New York and Kaszek of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The funding comes less than a year after RDP raised a $6 million seed round led by Bullpen Capital, a venture capital firm that had invested in FanDuel in 2011 when the company only had seven employees.

FanDuel eventually became a major player in fantasy sports in the U.S. and got into sports betting after the Supreme Court in 2018 overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, paving the way for legalized sports betting.

“We’re at the tip of the iceberg (with RDP),” said Paul Martino, Bullpen Capital’s co-founder and general partner. “We think they’re going to run the same playbook FanDuel did, go become a leader in fantasy sports, have the most depositors ready to go and as the regulations catch up, they’re going to start launching sports betting (in Brazil). It’s going to be the same playbook and it could be a company every bit as big as FanDuel.”

The connections between RDP and FanDuel run deep. Shortly after friends and Brazilian natives Mateus Dantas and Kiko Augusto co-founded RDP, Dantas sent an unsolicited message via LinkedIn to Nigel Eccles, the co-founder of FanDuel. Dantas at the time was still working as a software engineer at Snap Inc., while Augusto was in graduate school.

To Dantas’s surprise, Eccles was enthusiastic and helpful when Dantas explained his dream of someday turning RDP into the FanDuel of Brazil. Dantas and Augusto then flew to New York to meet with Eccles for the first time, and the two ended up leaving their jobs in November 2019 to concentrate full-time on RDP. Eccles last year became RDP’s chairman, and he has advised Dantas and Augusto on growing RDP.

“He’s been helping us a lot,” Dantas said.

For now, RDP focuses exclusively on soccer, a sport that it is by far the most popular in Brazil. Most of the users are drawn to fantasy games surrounding the domestic leagues such as Brazilian Serie A, but RDP also has contests for soccer leagues in other countries, including England’s Premier League and Spain’s La Liga.

RDP, which offers free and paid games, claims it has distributed more than $5 million in cash prizes since its inception. The company plans on using the proceeds from its Series A round to offer more prizes, market the platform to a wider audience, improve the product and increase its number of employees from 75 currently to as many as 200 by the end of the year. RDP will continue to target soccer fans in Brazil, but it has larger aspirations to expand to other countries, sports and products.

“We still think there is a really huge market that we can tackle, that we can go after in Brazil,” Dantas said. “At least for the next year or so, we plan on sticking with soccer. But later on, we definitely plan on expanding into other sports and other products and verticals, as well. In the meantime, we really think soccer DFS (daily fantasy sports) is a really, really big market here in Brazil.”