Drone Racing League

Overview

Drone Racing League (DRL) is a sports and media company that creates and markets drone racing competitions.  The company seeks to leverage fans of traditional high speed sports such as Nascar and eSport viewers.  It designs its own drones that the racers then use to race along elaborate 3D courses.  They successfully utilized social media to grow their fanbase quickly and have secured spots on sports entertainment networks including ESPN.  In its first season DRL claims to have reached 30 million viewers.

DRL is a New York startup founded in early 2015 by a Tough Mudder executive named Nick Horbaczew­ski.  The company's first formal event took place at the end of 2015.

Why I like Them

Along with eSports this is the most innovative new type of entertainment to be created in the last two decade.  It is very fast and visually spectacular with the ability to carry the audience into the action through cameras on the drones or even virtual reality.    

It is hard to launch a new type of sport with an extremely high failure rate but DRL seems to have taken an informal hobby of drone racing and created a sports like franchise around it in a year.  Although fledgling I certainly expect it to become more popular and mainstream globally, especially as viewers of traditional sports such as baseball continue to decline

Disclosure:  All information is from publicly available sources, I have not had any contact with a member of the company or its investors.