Credit: Immortals Gaming Club
- Immortals, LLC has acquired the Brazilian game matchmaking platform, Gamers Club.
- The brand has rebranded its holding company to Immortals Gaming Club (IGC) and closed a $30M USD Series B funding round.
- Funds will be used to build infrastructure in Brazil, as well as expand Gamers Club into other games and markets.
Immortals, LLC announced that is has rebranded and closed a Series B Funding round totaling $30M. In addition, the company has acquired the Brazilian game matchmaking platform Gamers Club. The newly rebranded holding company, Immortals Gaming Club (IGC), will operate two businesses—IGC Esports and Gamers Club, leading an expansion in the Brazilian market.
Immortals Gaming Club will become the first vertically integrated esports franchise operator and gaming platform.
IGC Esports will operate Immortal Gaming Club’s esports rosters under the Immortals , Los Angeles Valiant
Additional operating companies will be announced later this year, according to a release.
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Ari Segal, Immortals chief executive officer, told The Esports Observer that Brazil offers a number of unique opportunities.
“There are not a lot of what you’d consider global tier-one organizations focused on Brazil so we saw a wide space opportunity to move into that market,” said Segal. “Once we started to understand it more and more, we saw an opportunity to do something that we thought was very different, very special and had massive synergies with our core business.”
Capital from the funding round will be used to expand Gamers Club into new games and new markets, Segal said, but it will also be used to expand other IGC properties into areas not before considered.
“Until now, the only addressable market for MiBR was fans of professional Counter-Strike. It’s a massive market that has all kinds of great characteristics for sure, but it is 10% of the size of the total Counter-Strike gaming market.
“We’ve also started building an operating organization that extends to both Gamers Club and our other Brazilian businesses. It’s about building boots on the ground infrastructure in Brazil and a best-in-class, vertically-integrated esports organization.”
Once Segal transitioned from traditional sports to esports, he observed a different relationship dynamic between teams and fans. While traditional sports see the two as separate entities, esports is more of a community.
“Gamers Club allows us massively differentiated touchpoints to really lean into that [community mindset] and extend the relationship that we have with people who connect the game IP across different dimensions,” said Segal. “No longer are we limited to that team-fan frame that to some degree has limited the interaction between traditional sports teams and fans to this point.”