Duplays secures second round of funding from leading institutional investors

The latest investment is led by some of the top venture capital firms in the Middle East, BECO Capital and Wamda Capital. DUPLAYS initially received seed investment from MENA Venture Investments Ltd. founded by Fadi Ghandour, also Founder and Vice Chairman of Aramex, and Arif Naqvi, Founder and CEO of The Abraaj Group.

The investment has allowed DUPLAYS to develop its web capabilities to enable sport, fitness and adventure companies to manage their own activities on its platform, market to a targeted audience and provide a better and more diverse experience for its growing community of users.

Its Community Sport Provider (CSP) program aims to solve a number of issues faced by small to medium sized merchants (what DUPLAYS has coined 'sport entrepreneurs') - by providing:
- a web presence on DUPLAYS.com
- secure online payment options
- communication and scheduling tools
- exposure to DUPLAYS' growing user base of over 40,000 members.

"Our aim is to be the leading web platform for all sports and activities in the markets we have a presence in and connect communities through sport in order to bring people together. Our growing community is looking for more choice and users can now search and sign up for a wider range of organized activities.

"With many smaller businesses and health professionals offering a range of great sports, fitness and adventure activities, we identified an opportunity to act as a central, trusted resource that would allow DUPLAYS to host and promote a wider range of sports services to the thousands of visitors that come to our site every month. Our new Community Sport Provider product is a great marketing tool to raise the profile of a business among a targeted, active-minded demographic. It is a more sustainable way of promoting and monetizing a health or activity related service when compared to discount sites that reach a wider but less relevant audience, and aren't as financially viable for the merchant," said Ravi Bhusari, Co-Founder of DUPLAYS.

The CSP tools allow sport providers to focus on what they do best: offer high quality sport and fitness activities and instruction, without having to divert finite resources to support, administration and marketing services.

Speaking about the investment and new developments for DUPLAYS, Fadi Ghandour said; "What DUPLAYS offers and has achieved since its launch demonstrates the need for such a dynamic and community focused service. The development of these new services and the ability for third parties to integrate and benefit from the use of technology can only mean further improvements to the health and wellbeing of the population, which we should support as much as possible."