WinZO raises Rs 133 Cr Series B round, valuation touches Rs 460 Cr

Vernacular real money gaming platform WinZO Games has secured $18 million in a Series B funding round led by Makers Fund and New York-based Courtside Ventures. The Delhi-based company has received fresh capital after a gap of 13 months. 

While the company has not given break-up and other details of the round, Entrackr has decoded it through regulatory filings. The Singapore-based Makers Fund infused Rs 60 crore, while Courtside Ventures invested Rs 41.25 crore in the round. Existing backers - Kalaari Capital and Bellerive Capital have poured in Rs 7.5 crore each. 

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. 

The company has allotted 618,160 Series B CCPS for Rs 1904.49 per share to raise the total amount, shows regulatory filings. So far, Rs 117.72 crore has been received by the company and the remaining Rs 18.28 crore is likely to come soon.

Fintrackr’s calculations estimate WinZO’s valuation in the range of Rs 460-470 crore (post-money). In July 2019, WinZO had raised $5 million worth Series A round from Kalaari Capital. The three-year-old platform would deploy fresh proceeds towards strengthening the content pipeline and captivating mobile-first consumers.

Floated in 2017 by Nanda and Saumya Singh Rathore, WinZO is a game marketplace where it acquires games from developers and pushes them to users through its platform. In an interaction with Entrackr, Nanda said, “We have 30 developers on the platform out of which 70% are Indian and rest are from overseas. Casual games such as carrom, cricket and 8 ball pool are the most popular games on WinZO.”

WinZO’s games are available in 12 local languages with over 25 million registered users. The platform claims to clock over 1 billion micro-transactions every month.

While WinZO has no competition on a platform level as none of the large gaming companies is trying out a horizontal marketplace approach, its verticals do compete with Rummycircle, Rummybaazi, Dream11, MPL and a few others. 

Globally, Skillz has been championing the marketplace approach since 2012-13. On Wednesday, the company announced its IPO to raise an estimated $849 million in cash from investors at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation.