Vernacular language gaming platform WinZO has raised $18 million in a Series B funding round led by Makers Fund and Courtside Ventures. Revant Bhate, FinAdvantage, Indigo Edge, and Co-founders Paavan Nanda and Saumya Singh Rathore also joined the funding round.
WinZO’s founders — Paavan Nanda and Saumya Singh Rathore invested Rs 5 lakh each. Indigo Edge, FinAdvantage, Swapna Gupta, Revant Bhate, and Siddhartha Patel also participated by investing Rs 1.37 crore collectively.
WinZO is a Delhi based vernacular language gaming company founded in 2016 by Paavan Nanda and Saumya Singh Rathore. It is a game marketplace where it acquires games from developers and pushes them to users through its platform.
Singapore-based Makers Fund is a global interactive entertainment fund and Courtside Ventures is based in New York.
Michael Cheung, Partner at Makers Fund says “WinZO is at the heart of India’s gaming evolution, a geography we’ve been tracking for some time. Paavan and Saumya’s success through a hyper-focus on their player ecosystem is evident, and a clear asset as they accelerate their growth”
“Along with their network, support and fresh financing, we are confident we can propel WinZO even further as a business and become an even more lovable product for our customers. It’s time to put all the learnings and experiences of the past toward building something huge,” said Paavan Nanda, Co-founder, WinZO.
The company has vastly benefitted in the times of lockdown induced due to the increasing number of Covid-19 positive cases in the country. The recent ban of PUBG in India gives WinZO the opportunity to fill the void in Indian gaming.
WinZO plans to strengthen its content pipeline and go after mobile-first consumers and their gaming needs. Revenues have grown many-fold and it has added 20 million users in the last 12 months, a majority of whom spend over 45 minutes daily on the platform.
The platform is available in 12 languages with over 25 million registered users. Clocking over 1 billion micro-transactions per month, WinZO offers more than 70 games across various multiplayer formats.