TSM have announced, in a major financing round, that the team has raised an enormous amount of $37 million from a wide variety of different investors. They will use the money to further expand their brand in the North American region.
The large investment was first reported by Forbes although Swift had already made the announcement on Tuesday night. Swift is the parent company of TSM and they have worked together with Ethan Kurzweil of Bessemer Venture Partners in order to get people to invest in the brand. The investors include some really big names like 3-time NBA winner Stephen Curry and Yahoo! Inc. co-found Jerry Yang. Other investors include:
- Telstra, Australian telecommunications
- Steve Simon, owner of Simon Property and son of Indiana Pacers owner Herb Simon
- Andre Iguodala , three-time NBA champion for the Golden State WarriorsAdvertisement
- Steve Young, Hall of Fame NFL player
- Yifang Ventures, led by Eric Xu, co-founder of Baidu
- Colin Carrier, former chief strategy officer of Twitch
- Walter Wang, CEO of JM Eagle
TSM founder Andy Dinh has stated that the organization will use the money to finance franchise fees as well as to build a 15,000-to-20,000 square foot esports facility in Los Angeles. Such a large esports facility is unprecedented and it will be interesting to see how big of an advantage the team will gain from having a dedicated esports facility.
Previously, TSM has always been an organization that was extremely self-sufficient. Despite being one of the most successful esport organizations around, they have never relied on large investments in order to raise money, even when their competitors all had large investments coming in. This is the first time that TSM has received such a large investment is subsequently the end of independent team owners in the LCS that we saw when the professional League of Legends scene was starting up.
TSM found has told Forbes the following regarding the investment “TSM has always run a very lean operation, so we haven’t set ourselves up to take advantage of the fast growth that this market is experiencing, so that’s what we’re trying to prepare ourselves to do. We’ve got a really good group of investors…it’s going to help us accomplish what we want for TSM.”
