Sequoia is helping One Championship become the top streaming platform for martial arts

All of One Championship’s live fights will soon be streaming on its own mobile app / Photo credit: One Championship

One Championship, a major Singapore-based organizer and broadcaster of its own martial arts competition, is now setting its sights on launching a YouTube-like service for the martial arts world. It will release a video streaming app in early May, revealed founder and CEO Chatri Sityodtong to Tech in Asia. The app will feature its own martial arts content as well as related licensed material, including movies and other competitions.

The Sequoia- and Temasek-backed media company has largely focused on sports promotion, with live martial arts events and TV broadcasting. For its transformation into streaming, it set up its own engineering team in Bangalore under the guidance of investor Sequoia India.

One Championship estimates there is more than a billion martial arts fans it can potentially reach through mobile streaming. “The NBA has 8 million subscribers on YouTube,” Sityodtong tells Tech in Asia. “If we don’t get 8 million downloads right away, I’ll be shocked.” He adds that the company expects “a few hundred million” users in the first two to three years of the app rolling out, given “the size of Asia and the relevance of martial arts.”

The company rose to prominence in Asia through its mixed martial arts events but Sityodtong wants One Championship to represent martial arts in general. The brand will be adding more martial arts promotions and fights under its umbrella, like kickboxing, karate, and more, and making them available on the app.

It also hopes to eventually include martial arts movies and shows beyond just fights – it already has some online shows of its own. Sityodtong hopes to make the app an all-around destination for fans and practitioners of martial arts.

The Sequoia effect

One Championship raised an undisclosed amount last year in a series C round co-led by Mission Holdings and Sequoia India – a deal that closed in under 10 weeks, an unusually short time in Asia, where such deals can take more than six months to close.

The involvement of Sequoia, a venture capital firm that’s known for its tech investments, seemed even more unusual. It turns out that the firm was instrumental in driving this tech initiative for One Championship.

Making the content available for free on the app was Sequoia India managing director Shailendra Singh’s idea, Sityodtong says. “My jaw dropped – I thought he was joking,” he chuckles. “Then I realized he was serious.”

Singh sees working with founders to help evolve the business or offer a different perspective as a core part of Sequoia’s job. “In this case, we had ideas about re-imagining the sports media market, using insights on live video streaming and [user-generated content] trends that we are witnessing in China,” he tells Tech in Asia. “These quickly resonated with Chatri and we all got aligned on this very fast.”

Sequoia was instrumental in driving this tech initiative for One Championship.

The venture capital firm loaned its director of technology, Anandamoy Roychowdhary – a veteran from companies like Zynga and Symantec – to oversee the project, and its UX design head, Abhishek Ghate, drove the initial look and feel of the product. Roychowdhary and Sequoia’s human resources team scouted and recruited people for One Championship’s engineering team in Bangalore, according to Sityodtong.

That’s how One Championship’s own CTO, Mahesh Subramanian, was brought aboard. Subramanian has worked in online video since 2009, when he co-founded video streaming startup Touchfone Technologies. The startup and its streaming platform, StrmEasy, were acquired by Delhi-based ScoopWhoop Media in 2016.

The engineering team, based in Sequoia’s Bangalore offices, is close to 20-strong and growing. Besides the app, the team is exploring potential augmented and virtual reality applications.

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