SUMMARY
Rein Games will invest funds in streamlining product development
Rein Games is the developer of Real 8 Ball Pool game
Investments in Indian gaming startup is growing at a CAGR of 22%,
Noida-based online gaming startup Rein Games, on Thursday (December 11), announced that it has raised INR 5 Cr in a seed round led by Ranjan Pai’s Manipal Education and Medical Group (MEMG) family office and Titan Capital, besides few other high-net-worth individuals.
With the recently raised funds, Rein Games will streamline product development, invest in acquiring more users. Additionally, the company will invest in strengthening its team across various verticals.
Speaking about the future plans of expansion, Vaibhav Gupta, CEO and cofounder of Rein Games, said that the company will focus on building and mastering one game at a time and innovate around that before moving onto the next game and so forth.
Gupta further added that as real-money gaming takes off in India, the company believes that the users will increasingly seek depth and value in online games, to get high-quality game experience.
Founded by Gupta, Himanshu Devra, Pranav Chaudhary and Nishtha Gupta, Rein Games has developed Real 8 Ball Pool, which is a skill-based real money game developed on the concept of eight ball pool.
For improving the overall user experience and gaining the trust of its users, Rein Games claims that it has developed an artificial intelligence-based system, which tracks money-flow over the platform and leverages it for multiple purposes — redirect benefits to fading users, increase user engagement, curb any fraudulent activity, among others.
The concept of skill-based real money online gaming has spun off from the success of fantasy sports operators in the country. The number of fantasy sports operators in India have witnessed a seven-fold growth since 2016, with 70 operators in 2018. Moreover, the number of fantasy sports users in India has also grown 25 times to 50 Mn users in 2018 from mere 2 Mn users in June 2016, according to KPMG.
Dr Ranjan Pai, managing director, MEMG asserted the growth of online real money gaming and said that skill-based real money gaming in India is poised for a big take-off.
According to DataLabs by Inc42 between 2014 and Q1 2019, the total venture capital funding in Indian gaming startups stood at over $337 Mn. Moreover, the investment in Indian gaming startup is growing at a CAGR of 22%, with the top-funded startups being Dream11 with $100 Mn in total funding, followed by Smaaash Entertainment with $82.6 Mn in funding, and Nazara Technologies with $79 Mn.
