Entrepreneur of the Week: Ravi Bhusari and Brian Sigafoos of Duplays
Channel: Wamda
Date: 03/07/2012

This week's entrepreneur of the week is Ravi Bhusari, who founded Duplays (http://www.duplays.com), along with co-founder Derv Rao. Here he chats, along with Brian Sigafoos about how they are developing the platform, which connects people in Dubai to organized sports games and events. Duplays has been steadily building its userbase since its beginning in 2007- you'd be hard-pressed to find a person in their 20s in Dubai who enjoy sports and hasn't heard of it. 

One of the most fun aspects is playing different sports and meeting people of different nationalities, says Bhusari. "Once, we looked at passports from our basketball league, and of the 80 players in the league we had 30 different passports," says Sigafoos.

Having conquered the local market and taken on a first round of funding from MENA Venture Investments, the next challenge at Duplays is going regional and global. To do so, they plan on expanding their on-the-ground presence to Riyadh, and launching an Arabic version of the site, says Bhusari. Duplays is also enhancing their online website to become more crowdsourced, allowing people to organize and post their own sports leagues- anywhere in the world. "We're focused on the region primarily first," says Sigafoos.