Bengaluru-based CloudFeather Games on Wednesday said it has raised $1.25 million (Rs 9.78 crore) in a seed funding led by Lumikai, with participation from Venture Highway, OYO’s global chief strategy officer, Maninder Gulati and Nazara Technologies’ chief, Manish Agarwal.
The startup - providing real-money gaming and WEB3 tools for game developers - plans to use the fresh funds to make key hirings across verticals as it scales its developer outreach programs, both for domestic and global game studios.
Established in 2020 amid the pandemic by Romi and Yash Chandra, CloudFeather aims to provide developers with in-built engagement and monetization into their games. The solution is a suite of full-stack competitive formats (tooling kits) that would offer developers a third-pillar of monetisation beyond in-app purchases (IAPs) and advertisements.
“Casual games do not have meaningful monetization avenues outside of Ads and IAPs. Given this, there is room for disruption by providing a novel monetization avenue which supercharges game engagement, without developers needing to re-design their existing game economies. We look forward to working with gaming leaders Lumikai and a curated group of strategic investors,” said Romi Chandra, co-founder, CloudFeather Games.
“Romi and Yash have pioneered system architectures for RMG platforms serving tens of millions of users. Leveraging their unique technical expertise in this space, they’re building a suite of tools for any game developer to supercharge community retention and monetisation, while also providing new experiences for gamers,” said Justin Shriram Keeling, founding general partner, Lumikai.
Lumikai is India’s first dedicated gaming and interactive media venture capital firm. The fund is building a next generation tribe of India’s creative and talented founders.
The firm has backed Indian companies including Bombay Play (building global hypersocial, cross platform games), game streaming platform, Loco and Eloelo (creator led, social gaming, live streaming platform), among others.
According to a report by investment banking platform Maple Capital Advisors, gaming startups in India have attracted deals worth $1.6 billion in the first nine months of 2021, exceeding the total value of investments in the sector over last five years.
With the onset of WEB3 and fantasy sports in India, the ecosystem has seen significant number of developments since the start of 2022. Earlier in June, cloud gaming company, the Gaming Project secured a seed funding led by Faad Network.
E-sports platform FanClash recently raised $40 million in a Series B round from Sequoia Capital India, Falcon Edge, Info Edge and Matic Networks.