This sports tech startup is popularising Kabbadi with cutting-edge content

Kabaddi Adda has also created its own tournament for juniors and uses analytical videos on YouTube to help participants excel in the sport

The ongoing eighth season of Pro Kabbadi League is unique on many fronts. Being conducted after a delay of a year due to Covid, this season is being played across hotels and convention centres which are not only the arena for players but also residence.

Here is another interesting fact: 23 of the players selected by various teams for the 8th season of PKL first participated in the K7 Kabaddi tournament organised by online sport content platform Kabbadi Adda.

Kabaddi Adda has, on its website, profiled more than 4,000 players. Every single player who has been bought in the auction and is playing in PKL this year has a profile on Kabaddi Adda, apart from K7 Kabaddi players.

The K7 initiative was started by Kabaddi Adda last year as a platform to amateur players, academies and coaches. From being just providing all sort of content on the sport, Kabaddi Adda has emerged over time to become a platform that gives new talent access to bigger tournaments such as PKL.

“We had invested Rs 11.5 lakh as prize money into this tournament. It is the second biggest tournament in kabaddi, there is nothing that runs for 17 days,” said Arvind Sivdas, co-founder Kabaddi Adda.

Kabaddi Adda’s YouTube channel registered nearly 22 million-plus views for highlights and short raids of K7 tournament.

“I have sat in four to five auctions, and almost 30 per cent of the players bought by the teams are known by none, other than the coach who has bought them. UMumba bought a player, Rinku Sharma for Rs 32 lakh. He has played tournaments that were covered by us, 2-3 people were bidding for him and he has good data on Kabaddi Adda. This tells you that content for kabaddi has potential from viewers and not just the federation,” said Sivdas.

Idea of Kabaddi Adda

In 2015, Arvind Sivdas and Dhanya Parameshwaran started an analytic and tech startup named Messy Fractals and ended up working in the badminton sports category with badminton star Prakash Padukone and Vimal Kumar. They helped profile the opponents that ace badminton player Saina Nehwal would come up against inthe 2016 Rio Olympics.

“We were doing a lot of analytics and trying to see if our method could really impact athletes in India,” said Sivdas.

The startup focuses on creating a content aggregation platform, along with sports analytics. Sports analytics is the collection of relevant data and statistics that can provide a competitive edge to a team or individual. For any athlete, it is easier to understand the game and analyse it in the video format.

“In sports analytics, video breakdown is critical. The athlete understands the language of video, regardless of which sport he is in. So, it is important to break everything down into a video unit, which an athlete can refer to and say this is probably something to work on,” explains Sivdas. 

While working on these projects, the team realised there was so much traction for kabaddi, and that there was an audience for the sport, but data wasn’t available. The company wanted to fill this gap and thus started the journey of Kabaddi Adda.

The startup was set up in February 2019, by third-time entrepreneur Arvind Sivdas from IIT Madras and IIM Calcutta, Dhanya Parameshwaran from IIT Madras, Suhail Chandhok, a sports presenter and commentator, and Vikas Gautham, who looks after the partnership growth of the business.

“We put out a YouTube channel which got a lot of traction. People wanted content on kabaddi. That was really the genesis of KabaddiAdda more than anything else,” he says.

K7 tournament for budding players

Kabaddi Adda as a platform is also organising Kabaddi tournaments and streaming them on the website to keep viewers engaged throughout the year. The idea was to give the young upcoming players a platform to showcase talent, apart from providing consistent content.

Kabaddi Adda launched K7, India’s premier professional junior kabaddi tournament, in association with FanCode, for exclusive broadcast rights of the K7 Kabaddi Stage Up tournament. Matches from the tournament were exclusively live-streamed on FanCode, reaching its user base of more than 20 million sports fans.

The teams that played in the K7 are existing academies, which ensured that the tournament helped the younger players showcase their talent. “We sold the media rights to FanCode, which allowed us to fund this tournament,” said Sivdas.

Surviving the pandemic 

For the founders of the platform, who have a penchant for the sport, surviving the lockdown was a difficult period. The platform, which thrives on content and streaming of a contact sport, was hit hard during the pandemic.

‘The first few months of the pandemic were really tough,’ said Sivdas.

In order to sustain during this this lean period, the founders had built a cricket team selection game called SuperCric, which helped them raise fund. The team built the game for gaming investor Nordanvind Gaming, which had originally invested in the product development. Since, the team wanted to focus exclusively on Kabaddi, it worked on product execution and handed it over to Nordanvind Gaming. The founders owned a part of the IP, which was sold and which constituted a large part of the funding.

However, in January 2021, a major Kabaddi tournament came back and its organisers reached out to Kabaddi Addda to cover the event. The team took the event live--the video content is an important part of the coverage.

Talking about it, Sivdas said, "We started with a YouTube channel with content on player interviews, how to play Kabaddi, and match highlights. The channel currently has 409,000 subscribers,”

Kabaddi Adda’s YouTube channel has 409,000 subscribers and the ‘skill series-seekh panga’ videos have the highest views,

Citing the above data, he said there is viewership for the sport but it is the connecting platform that is lacking.

Funding and revenue model

The startup had raised Rs 1.5 crore from Artha Venture Funds in a seed round-- its only funding till date.

Its revenue generation is based on creating and selling data to media platforms, fantasy gaming platforms, and franchises. Kabaddi Adda also helps franchises build their auction squads and manage team analytics.

The startup is also paid a fee for taking the tournament it covers online. 

“In the first year, we made Rs 26 lakh in revenue and the second year, Rs 54 lakh. For the first seven months of 2021 we have done Rs 2 crore and are aiming to get to Rs 3.5-5 crore,” said Sivdas.

The firm is looking for another round of funding to scale up the business. Artha Venture Funds is reinvesting in Kabaddi Adda.

Kabaddi Adda has built a tool that helps keep track of scoring by one person in real time--a task that would otherwise need 3-4 skilled people to do.

“Any tournament that wants to be available online comes to KabaddiAdda. We set up the entire scoring solution, score the game and because of that there is live data on the KabaddiAdda, tournament page,” he said.

While Kabaddi as a sport has garnered a huge following in the country, Women’s kabaddi is still lacking.

This aspect is something Kabaddi Adda will soon focus on. Sivdas said. After the successful launch of the K7 tournament, the enterprise plans to start a similar tournament for women.

“There are players who have the same strength and caliber for the game in women’s kabaddi too. We are planning to start something similar for women’s kabaddi,” Sivdas said.

With more matches and tournaments and general interest in the sport that has grown over the years, the founders strongly believe that the sport will thrive in India and elsewhere.