Gaming, entertainment and creative arts live broadcaster Caffeine raises $113 million in Series D funding.

Caffeine are a competitor to live streaming platforms such as Twitch and YouTube, launching out of beta in November last year. In 2018, 21st Century Fox invested $100m into the company to host a variety of Fox Sports and entertainment content such as Big East basketball, Bundelisga soccer, Formula E races, the FOX SOUL channel, and Anidom Beyond with host and comedian Andy Richter, as well as exclusive esports, video game, sports and live entertainment content. The platform also streams partners such as Disney, ESPN, DreamHack and Riot Games.

Announcing the funding in a press release by the company last week, Caffeine describe themselves as “a new kind of broadcast company focused on the creation and distribution of live, interactive entertainment”. They will be using the capital “to fuel continued growth and rapid onboarding of the world’s best entertainers”.

Caffeine connects entertainers with world-class technology so they can create content that is authentic and connects culture and community. We see this week over week during URL’s live battles where tens of thousands of people are experiencing something live and new together.

Ben Keighran – Founder and CEO, Caffeine

Bloomberg reported the company is now valued at over $600, and that the company would spend the funding to “invest in forms of entertainment that users can watch and engage with in real time”. The platform hopes to differentiate its programming from the big player in the space, currently dominated by Twitch and YouTube.

In February this year, Caffeine signed a multi-year exclusive partnership with Drake, to bring Ultimate Rap League to the platform. The opening stream Genesis gained 140k views and brought Caffeine to attention of many fans and those in the industry, with host creator such as Offset and Doja Cat, JuJu Smith-Schuster, Collin Sexton and Kyle Kuzma, Cartoonz, Ohmwrecker, and Crainer. Two million users have registered with Caffeine in the last year.