So, will Sorare end up on the list of shipwrecks from the Next40/FT120, France’s government-backed rankings of its top start-ups? Let’s say the question could be put differently. Is Sorare worth €4bn today, i.e. half of Carrefour, the French supermarket giant, and as much… as Eurazeo? No. And there are not many people, even among VCs, who can justify that valuation today (or even in 2021, for that matter).
Is Sorare still a unicorn? Probably not if it had to do another round now. But in reality, the question may be more interesting than that.
In the end, can Sorare just be a nice, profitable mid-sized company, one that simply cost its investors too much, but that will break even?
Well, the answer may be “yes”.
Since the end of the NFT craze, and more broadly since the giga crypto crash after FTX, Sorare has been struggling a bit, as the earlier charts show. It’s still more revenue than many unicorns (and even wannabe unicorns) ever reach, but it seems hard to go further, even with this new strategy of trying to win back existing users.
Sure, there are still a few NFTs worth a bit of money, and you still need a dozen ETH to buy a Bored Ape. But play-to-earn has turned into lose-to-play. To the point that all these players have switched the promise to play-to-own. What they tell you now is that the assets belong to you. Like Magic cards. But unlike a classic video game. Still, someone has to be willing to buy them back from you when you want to stop.
In the depths of the crypto winter, the company laid off 22 employees from its New York office (13% of the workforce). Julia justified the decision by a wish to centralise certain functions at the Paris headquarters. Eleven more employees from the New York office were offered relocation to Paris. The US office has not completely closed and still houses the teams working with American customers and on the partnerships with the MLB and the NBA. A similar operation is reportedly under consideration for this year.
Still, Sorare has a solid player base. Probably several tens of thousands, judging by trading volumes or the people active on Reddit. That’s clearly not enough to recoup the enormous licence spending. But it’s in line with the average for indie games when you look at daily Steam logins.
Will that be enough for the start-up to last?
At the end of 2024, there was about €80M left in the bank21. Given 2025 revenue (€35-40M) and costs that are probably falling (€80-90M according to internal projections, more like €90-100M according to another source), that leaves at least 18 months of runway, despite a likely loss of €40 to €50M. Julia is even more optimistic when I ask him about it:
“Sorare has solid foundations (several years of runway) to keep operating thanks to a much healthier cost base. […] notably thanks to the renegotiations with clubs and leagues, which have drastically reduced future financial commitments.”
An LP in one of the investing VC funds, for his part, says he is a little worried:
“Sorare won’t reach profitability for a long while, and it will have to do a Series C. I can see the problem coming a mile off: nobody will want to come in at a valuation above the Series B. So either nobody is big enough to invest. Or those from the previous rounds are going to get slaughtered.”
Because if I asked (not very innocently) earlier whether Sorare had lost its horn, the fact is that most funds have already acted on it, writing down their stake on their books. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a French fund manager talks of a valuation divided by 4. At SoftBank, a well-informed person talks of a stake valued 10x lower, i.e. $400M, when the VF2 portfolio was valued in Q1 2024. Along the way, we learned that the fund’s 285 or so investments, made for nearly $50bn, were currently worth only $30bn (hello Klarna, FTX, WeWork etc.), but that didn’t include the recent IPO of Chime. A situation comparable to VF1 ($68bn / $56bn), whose profitability rests solely on the masterful exit from Arm. As for the more anecdotal LatAm fund, its $7.4bn of investments are worth barely $5.5bn (with chunks of Swile and Sorare in it)
But according to him, VF2 would not be “opposed in principle” to a down round. Because that’s exactly what this Series C would be.
A few months ago, Julia told Maddyness22, a French start-up news site, that he wanted to be profitable in 2026, without needing that famous Series C. That said, the door isn’t closed, judging by what Nicolas Julia said in reply to my email:
“The growing interest of certain leading crypto organisations in projects like Sorare (to invest in them) [makes it possible] to provide comfort for the future and to set out calmly on the path to profitability.”
Let’s hope The Secret of the Unicorn doesn’t end as King Loser’s Sceptre.