One Championship’s quest to build the first multibillion, pan-Asian sports media firm

Photo credit: One Championship

What’s a business that’s enduring, highly profitable, and worth tens of billions of dollars? Over breakfast, Chatri Sityodtong pitched his vision to Michael Moritz and Douglas Leone, the head honchos of legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.

Just hours later, Sityodtong received an investment offer from Sequoia, which had put in money in an earlier round and done months of due diligence. The new funding round of US$100 million values his company at around US$1 billion.

Sityodtong, of course, is the founder and CEO of One Championship, the leading martial arts sports media startup in Asia. Its fast ascent and social media clout have been staggering. It secured funding from Temasek, Singapore’s state investment firm. One Championship has reached a billion video views on Facebook in 2018 so far – an 85-fold growth in over four years – rivaling the biggest sports leagues and media companies in the world.

Facebook video views in September 2018, courtesy of Tubular Labs

While the martial arts promotion has been around since 2011, it only burst into the consciousness of the tech industry last year, when Sequoia surprised everyone by announcing that it would fund One Championship.

The investment was puzzling because VCs tend to avoid media and events businesses, which are traditionally thought of as expensive and not scalable. They prefer backing platforms: think Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which don’t produce their own content but grew to hundreds of millions of users quickly at low marginal cost.

But Sityodtong sniffed out an opportunity. “Every region in the world has several multibillion sports properties, except for Asia,” he explains in an interview with Tech in Asia, looking every bit a martial artist himself (he trains every evening).

“Asia has been the home of martial arts for 5,000 years. There’s a martial art in every country that’s part of the history, fabric, and culture of the society. I thought, Man, there must be a way to unite 4 billion people around martial arts.”

What makes sports media a gold mine?

To understand what makes One Championship attractive, it’s important to examine how lucrative traditional sports leagues are. Here are the valuations of the top sports leagues in the US, which is derived by summing up the values of all the teams in each league.

Roadmap to billions