Synopsis
Eternal's District platform is expanding into India's booming sports market, moving beyond ticketing to venue bookings and brand partnerships. The company is actively seeking acquisitions in sports tech and, last year, launched its 'Play' service for booking sports courts. This move aims to build a comprehensive sports ecosystem, capitalising on the sector's significant growth potential.Listen to this article in summarized format
The platform is scouting for acquisitions in the sports venue booking and discovery segment, according to the people, and had held discussions with sports-tech startup Hudle, although those talks did not result in a transaction. Delhi-based Hudle last raised $2.5 million in 2025 from Sky Impact Capital and Physis Capital. Other startups in this segment include Game Theory, Playo and Khelomore.
“Sports is emerging as one of the most attractive categories within the broader outdoor consumption economy and District is looking to position itself in that opportunity. Ticketing for sporting events is the most visible piece of the puzzle and puts it in direct competition with Bookmyshow, but the larger opportunity lies beyond that,” an investor tracking the industry told ET on condition of anonymity.
“Consumers who are actively engaged in sports also spend on venue bookings, equipment, apparel, training, communities and experiences. If you can become the platform that sits across multiple parts of that journey, the wallet-share opportunity becomes significantly larger. District seems to be moving in that direction and you’ll also see other consumer internet companies taking a crack at this space in the near-term,” he added.
District, launched in late 2024, entered the category last year with its 'Play' service allowing users to book badminton and pickleball courts, and has since expanded the offering to nearly a dozen sports including football, basketball, swimming, snooker and box cricket.
The company is now exploring additional products and services aimed at sports enthusiasts as it seeks to build a broader sports ecosystem on its platform.
The expansion plans come as India's sports technology market gathers momentum. The sector, spanning venue and infrastructure solutions, esports, fantasy gaming and performance analytics, was valued at about $1.6 billion in 2024-25 and is expected to grow threefold to fourfold by 2030, according to a 2025 KPMG India report.
Alongside venue bookings, District, which is Eternal’s third-largest consumer-facing business after Blinkit and Zomato, is also partnering sports brands to launch products on its platform. It recently announced a tie-up with Virat Kohli's sportswear label One8 to offer users early access to a new footwear launch in Delhi scheduled for June 21.
Eternal did not respond to ET’s queries.
An email sent to Hudle’s founder and CEO Suhail Narain did not elicit a response.
Eternal’s District push
The Gurgaon-based company launched District as a standalone app for outdoor consumption after it acquired fintech firm Paytm’s events and ticketing business Insider for Rs 2,048 crore in August 2024.
After the acquisition, Eternal (then Zomato) brought back its former food delivery CEO Rahul Ganjoo to lead District.
The platform, which includes movie ticketing, live events, sports ticketing, dining out and offline retail aggregation businesses, clocked Rs 2,736 crore in net order value (NOV) during the January-March period, up 46% year-on-year. This puts the annualised NOV for District at more than $1 billion.
In Eternal’s quarterly letter to shareholders for January-March, the company’s chief financial officer Akshant Goyal said, “FY26 is also a meaningful baseline year for us. This is the first full year with the District app in its current form – a unified going-out platform where today a customer can book a restaurant, buy movie tickets, buy concert tickets, find and reserve a playing arena, or discover local retail stores. No other platform in India brings together this breadth of going-out use cases in a single app - and the more use cases we add, the higher the engagement frequency and the stronger the retention. Each category reinforces the others.”
The letter further said, “We have previously guided toward $3 billion in NOV and $150 million in adjusted Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) by FY30, implying approximately over 30% YoY NOV growth from here. Despite significant INR depreciation (since the time we gave the guidance), we remain confident in that trajectory.”
For the March quarter, District posted an adjusted Ebitda loss of Rs 81 crore (around $8.5 million).
