MPL claims 30 Mn users in 1st year with around 90% coming from smaller cities

As compared to China and other developed economies, the gaming segment wasn't able to attract a sizeable audience in India until 2017. However, things started to change in 2017-18 when a handful of fantasy sports platforms emerged from experimenting with the skill-based games (majorly cricket).

If we compare other segments with fantasy cum real money-based games, they scaled up faster than them. For instance, Dream11 had turned Unicorn with a secondary round led by Steadview in April this year.

While Dream11 became a Unicorn in seven years of operations, Sequoia-backed MPL is another fastest growing startup in this space. Within a year of operations, MPL has claimed to have 30 million user base in India.

This is a notable leap for any gaming startup as it amassed 30 million users in the last 12 months. For context, the company had only 10 million users in the first seven-eight months of operations. 

The growth outlines that MPL is only behind Dream11, which currently has an estimated 60-70 million users. Besides, the Bengaluru-based startup has also notched up the number 1 tag in the ‘Casual’ category of Google Play Store India.

According to Sequoia, MPL has seen a total of 4.7 billion games played across 4.11 million tournaments. It means it has created 1.2 tournaments every 10 seconds. 

The firm is also planning to add another ten games in the next six months, taking the total number of games to 48 from 38 at the moment.

The rapid growth comes on the back of wide popularity of its game portfolio in tier II, tier III cities. Close to 90% of MPL’s users come from such cities like Patna, Guwahati, Surat, Jammu & Coimbatore, claims the venture capital firm.

Currently, MPL runs 250K matches in 15 mins, with their large tournaments running for 30 hours with over 300K players.

Attributing its success to instrumentation and machine learning automation, the firm has set a five-year plan to build the largest mobile platform for competitive gaming and related content.

Till date, MPL has raises a total of $41 million in risk capital. Besides Sequoia, Srinivas Kiran Garimella and Shubham Malhotra founded startup has got backing from the likes of Times Internet, RTP Global, BeeNext, Venture Highway and Indonesian ride-hailing giant Go-Jek.