The acquisition will bring together Glance’s scale and lock-screen centric innovation with Gambit’s expertise in the gaming market. Glance Games – Glance’s lock screen gaming platform – has over 45 million monthly active users across Asia, said the company in a statement.
“Gaming is the most exciting content category across the world today and Gen-Z spends more time on gaming than on any other activity online,” said Piyush Shah, Co-founder of InMobi Group and President and COO, Glance.
This comes after Reliance owned Jio Platforms had invested $200 million in Glance valuing it between $1.7 billion to $1.8 billion. “The deal is expected to lead to further strategic collaborations between Glance, Reliance Retail and Jio across devices, commerce, content and gaming ecosystem,” InMobi had said in a statement then. The company is also backed by Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital and Alphabet, which invested $100 million in December 2020.
“Giving users live, connected, interactive gaming experiences on the lock screen is key to Glance’s vision of building the world’s largest live internet platform. We also aim to launch creator-led NFTs for live gaming which will generate unique ‘play-to-earn’ and ‘play-to-own’ possibilities for the entire gaming ecosystem,” Shah added.
Founded in 2015 by Yashashvi Takallapalli, Gaurav Konar, Ranaveer Sankieneni and Deepak Venkatramani, Gambit owns and operates gaming platform Nostragamus (Nostra Pro). Over 100 million games have been played on the Nostragamus platform, and it has close to 10 million registered users.
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Glance will leverage Gambit’s expertise to launch engaging live gaming experiences including tournaments, game shows, game streaming and multi-player games on lock screen. Gambit will also enable Glance to launch multiple casual-to-midcore games that can be enjoyed by diverse sets of gamers. In the coming quarters, Glance also plans to launch NFTs in live gaming. This will potentially enable creators, streamers and developers to monetize through assets and NFT-based game creation, while giving gamers unique experiences.
“We have already started seeing great traction for live gaming on Glance. For instance, over 10 million users watch live game streams on Glance every week now,” said Yashashvi Takallapalli, Co-founder and CEO, Gambit. “With Glance and Gambit’s combined strengths and our belief that there is a game for every person, we envision doubling the number of monthly active gamers on Glance Games in the next year.”
