OnePlay Bags Funding From Baring Capital, Kunal Shah, Others To Help Users Play Online Games Without Hardware

Cross-platform cloud gaming platform OnePlay has raised $1.8 Mn in a strategic funding round led by Baring Capital. The round also saw participation from Inflection Point Ventures, and other angel investors such as CRED’s Kunal Shah, Jupiter’s CEO Jitendra Gupta, Suraj Nalin of PlaySimple Games, and Gupshup’s CFO Amit Shrivastav, among others. 

Speaking with Inc42, OnePlay’s cofounder and CEO Harshit Jain said that the startup will use part of the funding to scale up research and development (R&D) on hardware and to optimise the video encoding and decoding technology. 

The startup will also deploy the capital to hire more and strengthen its product portfolio. Responding to a question from Inc42, Jain clarified that the startup will hire both senior staff and mid-level employees to scale its operations in the coming months. The startup is currently in the beta phase and has been slowly looking to roll out its product for users and businesses alike. 

Founded in 2019 by Harshit Jain and Abhik Saha, OnePlay is a decentralised and open-source cloud platform that allows users to stream games. The platform enables users to play games ‘without a gaming rig or the need for expensive hardware.

While still in its nascent stage, the startup currently earns revenue through a subscription service that charges users anywhere between INR 35 and INR 300 for accessing the platform. 

Jain told Inc42 that the startup is currently focused on a two-tier model – B2B and B2C – to scale its revenues, ahead of its full-fledged launch. Through the B2C model, the startup plans to onboard GPU owners who are willing to rent out their systems, which, in turn, would be deployed by OnePlay to streamline system traffic and offer it to users looking to avail such servers. 

On the B2B end, Jain also said that the startup is currently in talks with many telecom operators across the globe for a partnership, as it looks to spruce up the vertical. 

“On the B2B side, we are in talks with telcos across the globe. We will try to bundle our services with their subscriptions, just like how Netflix is doing as part of content, and then we will be their gaming partner for them and they can onboard the people for us. For 5G, the biggest use case is gaming and we are moving forward with the approach as to how we can utilise that in our favour,” Jain told Inc42.

The startup claims to have 24,000 people on its waiting list and is gradually rolling out its services to more users. Globally, it competes with giants such as Amazon Luna and NVIDIA GeForce Now across multiple offerings. At the same time, it also locks horns with local players such as JioGamesCloud, The Gaming Project and Ant Play in the space. 

As per a recent report, India’s gaming market, which crossed more than $2.6 Bn in revenue in 2022, is projected to touch $8.6 Bn by 2027.