Gaming start-up Zupee has entered into a revenue-sharing partnership with Jio Platforms Ltd, alongside raising $72 million Series B funding from WestCap Group, Tomales Bay Capital, Nepean Capital, AJ Capital, Matrix Partners India and Orios Venture Partners.
The fresh funds are part of the company’s $102-million Series B funding round, of which $30 million was raised in August 2021. With this funding round, the valuation of Zupee has touched $600 million. Overall, the company has raised $121 million across multiple rounds.
Speaking to BusinessLine about the partnership with Reliance Jio, Zupee’s co-founder and CEO, Dilsher Singh said, “Zupee will be deeply integrated into the Jio ecosystem and all Jio users will get access to all the Zupee games. Our games will also be distributed on Jio phones. Further, whatever revenue we generate from a user that comes on Zupee platform from Jio ecosystem, will be shared with Jio.” However, Singh did not share the percentage share that will be taken by Jio.
Expanding reach
The company claims to have over 70 million downloads in India and the new fundraise is expected to help it grow its reach significantly. Zupee will also use the funds for designing new games, products, and business lines, hiring talent, and international expansion. The company is working on making the platform accessible in 8-10 regional languages over the next three to four months. Currently, it is only available in English and Hindi. The company claims to have hosted 1.2 billion tournaments and gameplays on its platform have grown 6.35x in last year.
Zupee is a real-money gaming platform, which means users pay an entry fee to enter a gaming tournament and the prize pot gets distributed at the end of the game. However, users can also choose to play the games for free. Real-money gaming has been banned by multiple states in India including Karnataka, Assam, Odisha, Sikkim, Nagaland, among others. To which, Singh noted that the company is considering adopting a ‘play to earn’ revenue model which has recently emerged with the popularity of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and blockchain technology.
