Triller Acquires Majority Stake in Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship

BKFC x @triller pic.twitter.com/UhYi2SAL1D

— Bare Knuckle FC (@bareknucklefc) February 23, 2022

Two promotions that have helped alter the landscape of combat sports in recent months are forming a partnership.

Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship president David Feldman announced Wednesday during an interview on "The MMA Hour" that Triller, the social media company that has expanded into combat sports promotion, has acquired a majority stake in BKFC.

“We grew this thing to a point where we thought that we got it as far as we could take it by ourselves right now,” Feldman said. “We’ve overcome so many obstacles and so many people telling us no and, ‘this will never happen, you’ll never make it work.’ And we got to a point where we’re pretty well accepted among the combat sports community right now, and we needed to make a partnership that was going to take us to the next level, create more opportunities, more resources, more funding, more things like that to acquire some more fighters, take care of the fighters that are already there, and just create more opportunities for everybody.”

BKFC was founded in 2018 and become the first company to hold sanctioned bare-knuckle boxing events in the United States since 1889. It has held 27 events since its debut and has attracted a number of MMA notables to test their skills, including Chad Mendes, Paige VanZant, Mike Perry, Chris Leben, Artem Lobov, Joe Riggs, Chris Lytle and Leonard Garcia, to name a few.

Triller, meanwhile, entered the fight game in November 2020, when it promoted an exhibition boxing match between Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr. on pay-per-view. That event also saw Jake Paul knock out former NBA player Nate Robinson on the undercard, a viral finish that helped launch the YouTube personality into a Showtime Sports deal. Since then, Triller has held a card that saw Paul knock out former Bellator champ Ben Askren and another event topped by boxing matches between Vitor Belfort and Evander Holyfield and Anderson Silva and Tito Ortiz.

More recently, Triller launched Triller Triad Combat in 2021, a hybrid of boxing and MMA that saw former UFC heavyweight king Frank Mir fall to heavyweight boxing contender Kubrat Pulev via first-round knockout in the main event. In an MMA vs. boxing theme, the likes of Matt Mitrione, Perry, Albert Tumenov and Derek Campos also saw action.

Feldman claims that BKFC will remain largely the same, just with more resources and opportunities than in the past.

“Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship will remain as-is,” Feldman said. “We will be self-sustained as far as operations continue, the fighters, everything. Nothing is really going to change in the operations of Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship. We’re now just going to have more assets, more resources, and more possibilities.”