NEW DELHI: Gamezop, a multi-game platform, on Thursday said it has raised Rs 32 crore in a funding round led by Bitkraft Ventures.
Other participants in the round are Velo Partners, New-York based FJ Labs, Survam Partners (Suman Kant Munjal’s family office), and German venture capital investment firm AECAL, Gamezop CEO and co-founder Yashash Agarwal told. He said in February 2016, Gamezop had raised USD 350,000 in a seed round led by KWAN Entertainment & Marketing Solutions Pvt Ltd.
“The (latest) investment will be used to grow the mobile esports format and establish presence in select overseas markets through its piggybacking model. As we have seen some staggering numbers from the mobile esports format, a sizable portion of the fund infusion will be to expand in the segment,” Agarwal said. Also, the company is focusing on establishing physical presence in selected overseas market through its model of partnering with popular apps, he said.
Operated by Advergame Technologies, Gamezop was founded by Yashash and Gaurav Agarwal in 2015. It has 34 million monthly active users. The company licenses HTML5 games from top developers and embeds them in over 1,600 popular apps – including Myntra, Grofers, ShareChat, MX Player, Glance (InMobi), and PhonePe – enabling users of these apps to play games casually or competitively for cash.
The partner apps see an average 40 per cent boost in engagement time through games, in addition to getting a 50 per cent share in revenue made by Gamezop, Yashash said.
“Growth of mobile esports is truly democratising the access to competitive gaming and the ability to win real rewards. We decided to take it one notch further by going HTML5 and eliminating the need to force app sideloads – saves us a lot of money and our users a lot of friction,” Gamezop co-founder Gaurav Agarwal said.
He added that over the past few years, Gamezop has scaled to 1,600 apps that have integrated their games and by 2021, the target is be on 5,000 apps with at least one of its platforms.
Gaurav said at current levels, the company’s revenue numbers are expected to grow 5-6X in the next 12 months but declined to provide details. “We are also exploring other formats of real money gaming as well as free-to-play gaming. With the present user base of 34 million monthly active users, we have the numbers to test any new gaming format and analyzing results quickly,” he said.
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