India’s Loco has raised $42 million led by South Korea’s early-stage venture fund, Hashed, as a gaming frenzy rages on in the country of nearly 1.4 billion people.
New investors including Makers Fund, outsourcing billionaire Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures and Korea Investment Partners participated in the Series A round, as well as existing investors such as Crafton Inc., Lumikai Ltd and Hiro Capital, the live-streamed game company said in a statement. Announcement on Thursday.
capital flow to two year old child start upValuation of about $200 million, said two people familiar with the deal, who did not wish to be named. A spokesperson for Loco Interactive Pte., as the company is officially named, declined to comment on the valuation.
Loco said in its release that the fund will support streaming technologies, content creation and accelerated growth of the gamer and creator ecosystem.
Live-streamed games are still relatively new in India, unlike countries such as the US, South Korea and Japan, where it is a mainstream form of entertainment. Indian users primarily play and access live-streams through their mobile devices, while console-based and PC-based gaming are popular in mature gaming markets.
“India currently has 400 million gamers. Young Indians are spending a lot of time in the virtual world, and gaming is breaking urban and rural boundaries,” Loco co-founder Anirudh Pandita said in a Zoom interview. Loco’s daily user count has grown more than 15 times since January last year and the amount of time users spend on live-streamed games “live watch hours” has increased nearly 80 times, Pandita said. .
Loco’s other co-founders Pandita and Ashwin Suresh met as engineering graduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and went on to work on Wall Street before starting Pocket Access Pvt, a digital studio that offers an alternative to creating streaming content. provides. Traditional television entertainment with the third founder Aditi Srivastava. The gaming startup spun off from Pocket Aces last year and Srivastava, married to Suresh, is leading Pocket Aces.
“India is one of the most interesting gaming markets” and 40% of its gaming population belongs to the 10-30 year age group which is the basis of the gaming and e-sports communities around the world, said Ethan Kim, Co-Founder and Partner Said hashed.
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