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Deepen Parikh
Board Member at The Athletic
Deepen Parikh is a Partner at Courtside Ventures, which invest in early-stage companies that are transforming the intersection of sports and gaming.
Highlights
🔻 It's no secret that venture funds have been deeply impacted by the lack of liquidity in IPO and M&A markets over the past couple of years.
💰 Distributions from VC funds to LPs dropped 84% from 2021 to 2023 per Wellington Management, resulting in a 14-year low in overall distributions.
🇮🇳 Despite the anemic deal activity in the US markets, one market has far surpassed all others and continues to buck the liquidity trend: India.
🤑 Per Axios, India saw private capital-backed exits reach $25B in 2023 and has already surpassed $11.5B in the first half of 2024. Over these past 18 months, India has accounted for the highest share (37%) of overall exit value outside of North America and Europe...even surpassing China.
🏅 Not only has the country seen outsized deal and exit activity, but it has also experienced rapid growth specifically within sports and gaming.
🏏 Of the country's 1.4B people, an estimated 678M (47%) are now considered sports fans per Ormax Sports, roughly double the entire US population, with sports-related Google searches up 50% in the country this year. The Indian sports pandemonium hasn't been limited to just the country's borders. Just a couple of weeks ago, the US hosted the ICC Men's T20 Cricket World Cup, with jaw-dropping attendance numbers of 165k fans across the tournament as India's sports culture is successfully making its way into the US and abroad.
🎮 The Indian gaming ecosystem is also experiencing rampant growth. The country is now the fastest-growing mobile gaming market in the world per Interactive Entertainment, expecting to double in value from $3.1B in 2023 to over $6B by 2028. With over 568 million gamers and (even more noteworthy) 240 million paid gamers, the country is seeing unrivaled demand in various sectors of the gaming landscape.
Courtside has long seen India as a market ripe for venture investment, having made 6 investments in the country within the past 4 years. With a rapidly growing population of sports / media / gaming fans, increasing venture deal volume, and an attractive exit market, we couldn't be more bullish on the future of venture in India.
Check out the link below to see the full Axios article as well as Courtside's former blog post on India.
https://lnkd.in/gKRJ59v4
https://lnkd.in/gWJE5zqK
#VC #India #sports #gaming
When we first launched Courtside Ventures in 2016, our goal was to solve the massive dearth of institutional capital across the early-stage sports and gaming industries. The common misnomer at the time was that sports and most of gaming was not "venture scale". Eight years and three funds later, we are excited to share that it is!
From an innovation and early-stage investing standpoint, both industries are still in their infancy, and we firmly believe the opportunity globally will lead to several generational companies and outcomes over the next decade.
In an effort to peel back the curtain, we decided to launch our first edition of Courtside Ventures By The Numbers.
