Advergame Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which operates multi-game platform Gamezop, has raised $4.3 million (Rs 31.95 crore at current exchange rates) in a Series A funding round.
US-based Bitkraft Ventures, which focusses on gaming and related industries such as e-sports and interactive media, led the round, the New Delhi-based startup said in a statement.
Other participants in the round include Velo Partners, FJ Labs and Survam Partners, Gamezop said.
Survam Partners is the family office of Suman Kant Munjal, part of the founding family of Hero Group. Its portfolio includes fintech venture BharatPe, consumer-tech startup Atomberg and space-tech firm Bellatrix Aerospace. Last month, Survam led a funding round in fashion technology startup StyleDotMe.
Velo is a UK-based early-stage investment firm. FJ Labs is a US-based investment firm that has backed more than 500 startups worldwide including Indian companies such as Cityfurnish, BulkMRO and Zolostays, its website shows.
The company said it will use the fresh capital to grow its mobile e-sports format and establish its presence in overseas markets through its piggybacking model. It claims it has a user base of 34 million.
Malte Barth, founding general partner at Bitkraft, said that the firm had been looking to enter the Indian gaming market for a while. “With Gamezop, the factors that excite us the most came together nicely – proven model ready to scale, extreme capital efficiency, solid product moat, and an unfair advantage in user acquisition.”
Gamezop was set up by brothers Yashash Agarwal and Gaurav Agarwal in 2015. The company licences games developed in the HTML5 format and embeds them in platforms such as Myntra, Grofers, ShareChat and PhonePe. It also operates a competitive format through these apps, allowing users to play in both casual and real-money formats.
Gamezop had raised $350,000 (around Rs 2.3 crore) in 2016 in a seed funding round led by Delhi-based talent management firm KWAN Entertainment & Marketing Solutions Pvt Ltd. The US-based Powerhouse Ventures also participated in the round.
The fresh investment marks the latest fundraise by an Indian company operating in the gaming segment. The growing consumption of mobile internet and cheaper hardware have made the entertainment format a lucrative option for several investors and strategic players.
Earlier this month, New Delhi-based Lumikai announced that it had floated and hit the first close of an early-stage fund to back local companies. Lumikai – founded by Justin Shriram Keeling and Salone Sehgal – will invest at the pre-seed and seed-stage levels and will also have allocation for a few Series A bets.
In July, mobile game development studio Firescore Interactive Pvt Ltd raised around Rs 3.7 crore in a funding round led by multinational studio and publisher CrazyLabs. It said it would use the capital raised to set up a hyper-casual gaming hub for local and international game studios in India.
In January, e-sports streaming and community platform Rheo raised around Rs 14.34 crore in seed funding from a clutch of investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Surge, the scale-up programme of venture capital and growth-equity investor Sequoia Capital.
