Vernacular social gaming platform WinZO announced the third edition of its flagship Game Developer Fund with a corpus of $20 million (Rs 147 crore).
The fund will invest across firms in interactive entertainment like games, economies around gaming, content creation, live-ops, and security.
It will invest between $100,000 and $1 million in exchange for equity and deeper integration with WinZO’s technology stack.
WinZO, which is operated by The TickTock Skill Games Pvt Ltd, was founded by Paavan Nanda and Saumya Singh Rathore. The company allows its users to play games for real-world monetary benefits.
The platform currently offers games such as carrom, cricket, 8 Ball Pool, Fantasy Leagues, and Trivia in 12 languages. In the past year, revenues have grown over ten-fold, it claims.
The company earlier announced a Fund I of $1.5 Million in July 2019, Fund II of $5 million in November last year and received over 500 applications of which around 70 games were selected.
“For a larger part, gaming is considered as a hit or a miss opportunity among investors as unlike other industries such as e-commerce, SaaS and D2C, there is no stipulated playbook for creation of a successful game. As a result, a lot of gaming ideas/teams do not get requisite support in form of capital, guidance, or strategic help from the ecosystem,” Nanda said.
The announcement of the fund comes six months after the gaming startup raised Series C funding of $65 million (Rs 483.4).
WinZO had raised its Series B round in September last year from returning investors Makers Fund, Courtside Ventures, and Steve Pagliuca, co-chairman of Bain Capital. Hike had participated in a $5 million Series A funding round in 2019.
The gaming segment has been attracting a slew of investors in the past few years.
In June 2021, PUBG developer Krafton led a $9 million (about Rs 66.8 crore) seed round in Mumbai-based game streaming platform Loco.
In March, Dream Sports, the Mumbai-based company that owns fantasy gaming platform Dream11, scored a $400 million secondary investment from a slew of investors. The deal marked the first-ever India investment for Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm TCV.
