WWE Is Investing in an Up-and-Coming eSports Company

It is being reported by ESPN that WWE is now investing in an up-and-coming eSports organization alongside a number of other organizations.

WWE, alongside the Beverly Hills Sports Council, Raul Fernandez, Michael Ovitz, David Sacks & Bill Lee and others have invested in Cloud9.

Cloud9 is an eSports company that continues to grow year by year, originally created back in 2013. It has raised $25 million in Series A financing. This is first round of significant venture capital financing. It started back in September and closed this past Friday.

Cloud9 seems to be on the rise, as the pre-existing investors it had seem to be increasing their stakes within the company. This includes Hunter Pence, FunPlus, Rick Thompson, Alexis Ohanian and Lee.

The Founders Fund led the Series A financing, which is operated by several founders of PayPal. They were also one of the first investors in Facebook and was the first institutional investor in SpaceX.

WWE Chief Strategy and Financial Officer George Barrios had the following to say:

“We just looked around the space, looked at all the players and did our own evaluation of who we thought would be successful in the long term. We just thought that the Cloud9 team had developed lots of expertise and we’re just really, really impressed with Jack [Etienne, the Cloud9 CEO] and the rest of the staff; how professional they were, how organized and how much infrastructure they had built for a small organization. We thought they were on their way. We looked at a lot of players, and they were the ones we put in the top tier.”

If you’d like to see the eSports team Cloud9 in action, check out the exciting video below!

C9LoL | Play-in Stage

Does eSports interest you? Have you heard of Cloud9? Let us know in the comments below or over on our Facebook page or Twitter account. Additionally, you can find me on Twitter at @SOSNH1995. We also want to remind you that we have a Newsletter you can sign up to. This will allow us to send you the best news in one place via an email. We also have the Wrestling Rumors app that we encourage you all to download to get updates faster than they release on our various pages. It is available on Android and iOS devices.