What the business is
Unagi makes Ultimate Champions, a free-to-play NFT fantasy football game whose digital player cards sync with real matches across 45 European clubs.
Starting capital
€4.7M equity seed led by Sisu Game Ventures (with Sfermion, UOB Ventures, Signum Capital, 2B Ventures, Machame); €6.1M total equity plus $5.7M in token sales including Binance Labs' $4M Champ Token purchase
How it started
Charlie Guillemot, son of Ubisoft co-founder Yves Guillemot, and Remi Pellerin left free-to-play studio Owlient — acquired by Ubisoft in 2011 — in 2021 to found Unagi in Paris; Ultimate Champions launched in April 2022.
What happened
Binance Labs bought $4M of Champ Tokens in November 2022 and confirmed plans to deploy the game on BNB Chain, which happened quietly in late January 2023; the seed funds growing the team from 25 to 40 and a basketball version with EuroLeague due the next month.
What has to be true
The founder bet links two speculative worlds — web3 gaming and fantasy sports — through something concrete: official licences with 45 real clubs and results tied to real matches.
Pellerin's own admission that most of 220,000 users never pay makes the 5% transaction-fee model the honest thing to watch, not user counts.
Binance's involvement was a token purchase, not equity — a structure that gave the studio cash and chain placement without setting a valuation.
The EuroLeague expansion tests whether the model generalises across sports or is really a football-licence business.
What can be applied
In a speculative platform shift, the durable assets are licences and real-world sync; the token economy is monetisation, not the reason players show up.
Aftermath
As of the February 2023 announcement, Unagi planned to launch the EuroLeague basketball version the following month, grow from 25 to 40 staff, and sign more clubs and leagues; Pellerin left open expansion beyond sports into broader gaming.
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