Tech Billionaire, World Champion Carlsen Raise $15mm for F1-like Global Chess Tour

Tech Billionaire, World Champion Carlsen Raise $15mm for F1-like Global Chess Tour

German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner and 5x World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen recently raised $15mm to create a new Freestyle Chess league (the first tranche was announced in June, the second closing just occurred). The Freestyle Chess Players Club will feature the world’s top 25 players competing in ultra-exclusive tournaments at tourism destinations around the globe.

Left Lane Capital and Discovery Ventures led the investment round.

Most don’t think of chess like other emerging sports properties receiving funding. And if you’re only looking at it through an athleticism lens, that makes sense.

However, if you consider the TAM (think: 600mm+ play the game worldwide) and audience demographics (think: young, well-educated, wealthy, global), the opportunity begins to look comparatively attractive to many.

But Buettner isn’t looking at Freestyle Chess, or its market fit, relative to other challenger leagues. He views an established property –Formula One– as the single best comparative. The racing circuit is also tour based, worldwide in scale, and offers a uniquely high-end live event experience.

“If the F1 [Paddock Club] is for millionaires, Freestyle Chess’ [Grand Slam events] are for billionaires,” Jan Buettner (co-founder, Freestyle Chess) said.

The Freestyle Chess Grand Slam of Germany begins Friday (February 7-14).

The number of people playing the game is noteworthy because in nearly every country outside the U.S., the top participatory sports are correlated with the top spectator sports.

And 600 million is obviously a tremendously large number any way one contextualizes it. For context, FIBA estimates 450mm play basketball worldwide.

But chess isn’t just a game that people play. There is an audience interested in watching it too. A recent qualification tournament for the 10th spot in a Freestyle Chess event (i.e. the best players did not even play) drew an average audience of more than 35,000 concurrent viewers. 

“There [was] a big peak [in interest] after The Queen’s Gambit came out on Netflix,” Buettner said.

The Covid-19 pandemic provided a shot in the arm too (pun intended).

Buettner is a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded the entity that built and sold AOL Europe to AOL Time Warner for $6.7bn, then launched and led a venture capital firm that is now in its 17^th Generation. Most recently, he purchased a 180-acre estate by the Baltic Sea and turned it into a world-renowned luxury resort with a pair of Michelin rated restaurants.

His vision for Freestyle Chess surfaced after he re-embraced his childhood passion for chess in 2023.

“At the same time, I was going to a lot of clubs at Formula One [events] and saw the difference between how [they did hospitality versus how] chess was doing [its] tournaments,” Buettner said.

He was convinced he could stage ‘the best tournament the world had ever seen’ at his Grand Village Weissenhaus property. But to do that, he needed the world’s best chess player to participate.

So, he reached out to Carlsen.

His timing was right. The living legend was preparing to relinquish his classical world title and begin his next venture.

Together they “developed this concept [for a high-level] chess [competition] that's based on the Fischer Random [or Chess] 960 method of playing,” Buettner said. “We called it Freestyle Chess to make it [sound] more mass market appealing.”

Then they rounded up seven elite opponents.

The Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T. Challenge was held between February 9-16, 2024. The players and, more importantly, the fans embraced it.

“We had about one billion impressions around the world,” Buettner said. “Out of that, [came] the idea of doing a full professional chess league for the top 25 players in the world.”

Several investors and/or strategic partners reached out eager to participate in the wake of the G.O.A.T. Challenge’s success. Two stood out from the rest. 

One was Chess.com. The internet chess server and social networking site is “a marketing partner of [of Freestyle Chess] and [will continue] doing our distribution because they have such a big reach,” Buettner said.

The site is amongst the largest chess platforms in the world.

The other was Left Lane Capital. The high-growth consumer venture capital firm is also the lead investor in Kings League.

Having $15mm in funding enables Freestyle Chess to expand its events calendar. It’ll host five 8–10-day ‘Grand Slam’ tournaments this year, including stops in Paris, New York City, Delhi, and Cape Town, and then six annually beginning in ’26 (think: every other month).

Each tournament will have a winner. And like in F1, there will be an overall points system. A Freestyle Chess world champion will be crowned at the completion of each season.

But Freestyle Chess is not setting out to compete with the chess establishment.

In fact, is trying “to get as far away from the traditional chess world [and its thinking] as possible because it's boring,” Buettner said. “We want to be hip and sexy.”

Particularly, in the context of the in-person experience. 

Remember, chess tournament venues can provide for a more unique, intimate, and high-end experience than traditional sport typically could or would. The players (and journalists) at the G.O.A.T Challenge stayed on premises and shared meals alongside those in attendance.

“This is very attractive for people who basically who have everything [and are looking for differentiated experiential opportunities],” Buettner said.

But it’s not just the stars expected to draw .1%ers to chess events abroad. 

The vision is “to become a networking platform for [uber-wealthy] people to [connect with] their peers,” Buettner said. “You're going to meet, not millionaires, but billionaires who are on [your] same level.”

While Freestyle Chess’ in-person experience is designed to be exclusive, its approach to at-home or remote viewership is far more inclusive. The goal is to appeal to a mass market audience. 

That includes people who may not even know the rules of the game.

“Our target [viewer] is young, hip, cool,” Buettner said. “They are interested in K-pop bands and new fashion designs, cool people, cool stuff, [and] TikTok.”

Simply shaking up the sport’s format and matching up the top players won’t be enough to draw that audience in. Freestyle Chess understands that it must embark on a successful storytelling campaign to alter chess’ image and make its tournaments relevant to those next-gen fans.

“So, there's going to be a [on-demand television] series [debuting in] 2026, similar to Drive to Survive, covering Freestyle Chess,” Buettner said. “We are already having a production team following us around.”

Freestyle Chess is also relying on influential streamers to help it cultivate young fans. Endemic content creators, like Hikaru Nakamura (a top 10 player and streamer with 2.7mm YouTube subs), will stream live from Grand Slam events.

Levy Rozman (aka GothamChess), the Botez sisters, and Anna Cramling will all make the trek to Germany this weekend too.

“[We’ve created] a full studio for them so they can broadcast [and create content] from there,” Buettner said. 

Like most emerging sports properties, Freestyle Chess is not going to command meaningful media rights revenue out of the gate. Its events will stream for free on Chess.com and across a multitude of other platforms (including those controlled by the streamers).

However, that does not mean the nascent league is going to lose money until it finds a more traditional broadcast partner. The sponsorship-heavy business model has the league breaking even on an operational basis no later than the end of next year.

“We [expect to have all] the same brands as Formula 1 does,” Buettner said. “Once we are really showing our successful path, a lot of those sponsors will come to us because we are offering incredible possibilities with product placement.”

Freestyle Chess is also wisely pursuing site fees.

“We are getting host fees from cities that would like us to have our events there,” Buettner said. “We can showcase a city similar [to the way we did] with Singapore in November, when we had a match between Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana; [the] number two [player] in the world.”

The pair played on a yacht, atop the highest bar in Asia, and in a bank vault.

Freestyle Chess believes efforts to monetize social media and streaming channels, and sports betting will eventually yield meaningful revenues too. 

And “in the future, we [could potentially] also [add some] income from hospitality fees,” Buettner said.

That will depend on whether the league decides to charge the prominent fans it desires to have in attendance.

“We see them as part of the show,” Buettner said.

So, how big can a global chess circuit get? 

Those behind it are suggesting it has the potential to become a 10-figure business.

“The revenues we are [projecting] are in the tens of millions. But we’re sure that we can get [the top line] into the hundreds of millions,” Buettner said. “Our goal as a venture capital backed company is to be become a billion-dollar company [relatively] soon.”

If Freestyle Chess becomes the ‘chess club for billionaire fans’ envisioned, that just might happen.

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