Metallica, the legendary American heavy metal music band, has put its four decades of revenue into the future. The team invested in TrillerNet, the parent company of Triller, VERZUZ, Triad Combat, Triller Fight Club and FITE, the Bulgarian sports streaming platform, whose acquisition represented a notable exit for the SEE ecosystem back in April. The details for the deal aren’t disclosed.
Triller is an American video-sharing social networking service that allows users to create and share video content that can synchronize automatically to music using AI. Launched in 2015, the company announced they have over 300M users worldwide and its projected revenue for 2021 is over $250M.
Triller’s business model is based on various solutions, like Pay-Per-View, subscription, sponsorship, and advertising monetization. The platform is built so that it enables brands to give users a full journey from awareness to purchase with marketing, advertising, and e-commerce tools.
Targeting $5B valuation and IPO
The American company is on the path to going public and the executives want the valuation to go as high as $5B. Mahi de Silva, TrillerNet’s Chief Executive Officer, shared in the press release that both Metallica and Triller share the same passion for disrupting the status quo. While Cliff Burnstein, co-manager of Metallica, said that the investment represents the perfect opportunity to mix the band’s music with combat sports in the shared future.
This isn’t the first time the two names collaborated. Back in November, Metallica performed for Triller’s Triad Combat debut hybrid boxing-live music event. So far in 2021, this event along with Fight Club has sold over 3M pay-per-views, making it a top-selling combat sports/entertainment platform.
Other similar investors in Triller are Marshmello, The Weeknd, Snoop Dogg, and Lil Wayne, amongst other music industry executives.
FITE’s journey to the US
FITE is a digital streaming platform for sports and entertainment launched in 2016 in Sofia, Bulgaria by Michael Weber, Kosta Jordanov, Metodi Filipov, Nikolay Rashev, Reza Goodary, and Stefan Lilov. Their solution is available on both iOS and Android mobile phones, as well as on gaming consoles like PS4 and Xbox, and smart TVs, to name a few.
Their business model is based on different subscriptions, one that gives access to a limited selection of free content and many pay-per-view events that have to be paid separately, as well as the premium version which allows unlimited access to events and pay-per-view shows 30 days after they air with no ads.
They have over 200 partners including World Wrestling Entertainment, Top Rank Boxing, and Ring of Honor. With the Triller acquisition, FITE became the exclusive global digital distributor of all Triller Fight Club events.
Since the launch, they have streamed over 5000 digital events and have reached a global audience of over 10M users. This placed FITE on no.1 top-grossing apps in the world across all categories last year.
FITE.TV focuses on MMA and boxing. MMA is the fastest growing sport in the world, especially in the US with the help of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) marketing campaigns. UFC has had a bigger growth than other combat sports with the help of IoT and PPV.
