Dream Sports, Columbia Engineering launch new AI innovation centre

Dream Sports co-founders Harsh Jain and Bhavit Sheth along with Columbia Enginering Dean Shih-Fu Chang and others

Dream Sports, the parent firm of fantasy sports major Dream11, on June 5 announced the launch of Columbia-Dream Sports artificial intelligence (AI) innovation Centre, as part of the company's efforts to drive the next phase of innovation for its 220-million user base of sports fans.

This launch comes after the sports tech major signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science in March 2023. Dream Sports CEO Harsh Jain is an alumni of Columbia Business School.

The five-year, $10-million centre will aim to advance research and workforce development at the intersection of AI, machine learning, and sports tech, the firm said. It will leverage the university's deep strengths in AI, ML, and engineering with Dream Sports’ extensive expertise in sports and games technologies.

“At Dream Sports, data drives all our decisions. With Columbia’s renowned research capabilities, faculty, and infrastructure, and our expertise and investments in sports tech, we are confident that the Columbia-Dream Sports AI Innovation Center will help us solve some of the largest problems faced by hundreds of millions of sports fans," Jain said in a statement.

Read: Around 75% of users come from outside Tier I and Tier II cities says Dream Sports CEO

The centre will be led by Vishal Misra, professor of computer science and vice dean of computing and AI at Columbia, as its inaugural faculty director. Misra, who co-founded the popular cricket news website Cricinfo in the early 90s, has formally been an advisor of Dream11 since 2019, although he has been helping the firm from its early days.

“My journey with Dream Sports has been a long one, starting in 2013,” Misra said. “I am delighted that we have now come full circle and that Dream Sports is sponsoring this center, in some sense back to where a lot of it began.”

The centre will support four PhD fellowships and up to $1 million dollars in research funding every year. Faculty research projects will cover a broad range of topics, including generative AI, AR/VR systems, user-interface design, causal inference, recommendation systems, core machine and reinforcement learning, optimization techniques, and behavioral economics, the company said.

It also added that the centre will organise targeted events and programming for both academic and general audiences.

"AI is a vital strategic area here at Columbia Engineering, and it is the core of much of our groundbreaking research. The field of sports and games is of enormous interest to a broad and diverse audience,” said Columbia Engineering Dean Shih-Fu Chang.

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Dream11 claims to have over 220 million users playing fantasy cricket, football, kabaddi, basketball, hockey, volleyball, handball, rugby, futsal, American football and baseball on the platform.

Apart from Dream11, Dream Sports houses brands such as sports content and commerce platform FanCode, sports experiences platform DreamSetGo, mobile game development unit Dream Game Studios, and its philanthropic arm Dream Sports Foundation.

Founded in 2008 by Jain and Bhavit Sheth, the firm was last valued at $8 billion when it bagged a $840-million funding round led by Falcon Edge, DST Global, D1 Capital, Redbird Capital, Tiger Global, TPG and Footpath Ventures in November 2021.