Palestinian startup to tackle global fantasy football market with Ace Roster

With support from Silicon Valley, a Palestinian entrepreneur who built the first Arabic fantasy football platform, is hoping to go global.

You might say that Talal Jabari, founder and CEO of Fariqak, is having a good year. One month after receiving an investment pledge of around $100,000 USD from Arabreneur’s first investment round in January (and another, bigger sum from an angel investor), Fariqak was selected to attend the Blackbox Connect immersion program in Silicon Valley, where Jabari pitched his idea to “big names, VCs and entrepreneurs, including the #3 guy from Google, David Drummond,” who chairs Google’s investment arms.

Now, building on their feedback, the Palestinian entrepreneur is gearing up to launch a global version of Fariqak, which means ‘your team’ in Arabic, with the English name Ace Roster, just before this year’s World Cup in June. Will he be able to scale his platform to serve the global market?

As it stands today, Fariqak allows users to select their own fantasy football team, using players from the English Premier, German, and Spanish Leagues, selecting across the leagues or limiting themselves to one, putting them together on a team. Each week, fans can see how their team is stacking up, thanks to an algorithm Jabari’s developers built to cull information from multiple sports reporting sites. Whether they use the platform in Arabic, English, or Turkish, the users who come out on top stand to win a jersey signed by Lionel Messi, the superstar FC Barcelona player.

See original:

Palestinian startup to tackle global fantasy football market with Ace Roster