After the ban on real-money gaming (RMG) earlier this year, sports tech company Dream Sports is again venturing into a new area: an open-source initiative under a new brand ‘Horizon’.
This initiative comes a few months after Dream Sports, the parent company of fantasy sports business Dream11, launched Dream Money, a personal finance app.
Horizon’s first offering, HorizonOS, will provide tools to help developers build, test, and deploy faster, through core building blocks for application development. It will also offer systems and platforms that allow applications to run and be managed at scale.
As part of the offering, the company will open-source the tech stack of Dream11 to startups and MSMEs (micro, small, and medium enterprises) across sectors such as ecommerce, fintech, and health-tech, and the global developer community.
For now, the software stack will be free for use, said Amit Garde, CEO at Horizon, adding that the offering has the potential to be monetised in the long term.
Speaking to YourStory, Garde elaborated on the monetisation opportunities: “Some customers would want to take the software and run it themselves. Others would want the software to be managed by the experts who built it (the developer team at Horizon); then they will pay for the convenience of someone else managing and operating the software.
“There are also certain kinds of dual licensing models, where some custom extensions or specifications could be done. So, there are a variety of ways in which potentially it’s monetisable later.”
At the moment, the company is evaluating how its tech stack can be useful to the startup community.
Garde noted that if the platform takes off and onboards a lot of users, that would indicate potential for monetisation.
The software stack was born out of the unique challenges that the company faced over the years.
Dream11 built its own tech stack to keep up with the overwhelming traffic on its platform. Over the past decade, the platform has served over 300 million users, and has seen 16 million concurrent users, and up to 100,000 transactions per second in some instances.
”This software organically came out of the unique problems we had to solve for. It is not a vanity project that is being done just for a headline or something. It is a battle-tested, provenance-scale solution that solves problems—they may have been a little unique or extreme in Dream11’s scale, but they are very concrete problems that almost any startup or any scaling startup is likely to encounter,” said Garde.
Dream11’s real-money gaming business ceased operations in India following the online gaming bill passed by the Government of India in August this year. Notably, the company did not cut jobs in the aftermath of the legislation.
Incidentally, the Horizon team consists of 200 engineers who were all part of Dream11, before the company pivoted to other ventures after the ban on real-money gaming.
At that time, the fantasy sports platform had noted that it had lost nearly 95% of its revenue after the ban. Since then, it has doubled down on its existing streaming vertical FanCode and has also ventured into financial services.
