Skill-based gaming company Zupee on Tuesday said it has raised USD 30 million (about Rs 222.5 crore) in funding, co-led by WestCap Group and Tomales Bay Capital. The series B funding round, which also saw participation from Matrix Partners India, was done at a pre-money valuation of USD 500 million, a statement said.
The latest capital infusion round comes within six months after the series A round that valued the company at USD 100 million. The company has raised USD 49 million so far and its other investors include Smile Group and Orios Partners. Zupee has an existing user base of over 10 million users. This new round of funding will be used to enable scaling efforts through expanded product portfolio, deepening market reach and hiring global talent.
“The only word which can capture our growth is ‘exponential’. In the last 12 months, we’ve scaled our user base by over 10x and grown our revenue by over 15x. And it’s not just the topline numbers. We have been achieving this while ensuring very strong unit economics and industry-leading margins,” Zupee founder and CEO Dilsher Singh said. He added that Zupee has over 200 employees and it will continue to scale and “double our workforce in the next two quarters”.
Asked about profitability, Singh said: “We have very strong unit economics and industry-leading margins. We are focussing on scaling our user reach while continuing our strong unit economics”. “With our strong understanding of fundamental human behaviour and human motivations, we are focused on reengineering popular time tested games for superior monetisation and engagement,” he added.
Founded in 2018 by Dilsher Singh and Siddhant Saurabh and incubated with funding from Smile Group, Zupee’s portfolio has gaming formats of multiple popular board games. The flagship gaming app hosts live trivia quiz tournaments and has seen over 250 million gameplays.
“At present, our efforts have been focused on India. That said, with an opportunity size of USD 98 billion by the end of this year and 3 billion gamers, expanding to other markets is certainly on the cards. It is still too early to say who will be the users across the world who we get to touch and impact through our games but our ambitions remain global and we’re making progress in that direction,” Singh said.
According to industry reports, the global online gaming industry is estimated to grow from USD 98 billion in 2020 to USD 272 billion in 2030. In 2020, the industry saw over 53 billion mobile gaming downloads worldwide, of which 17 per cent came from India. By the end of this year itself, there are expected to be 2.9 billion players worldwide.
