MadRat Games Raises Fresh Funds From Ratan Tata

MadRat Games, which has launched a wearable gaming platform SuperSuit for kids & families this year has raised fresh funds from a consortium of investors including Ratan Tata, Ola’s founders Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, Flipkart’s founder Binny Bansal, and Girish Mathrubootham of Freshdesk, confirmed the company.

With this round of funding, the total amount raised by the company comes to over $2.5 Mn. Also, the startup has brought on board Alice Brooks, founder & CEO of Roominate and Rajiv Patel, owner of Lift Projects, as the head of design.

Founded by IIT Mumbai and Carnegie Mellon alumnus Rajat Dhariwal along with his team Madhumita Halder and Manuj Dhariwal in 2010, the offline product gaming startup will use the proceeds for product development and pre-order campaign. Initially, it built offline educational games such as board games, learning puzzles, toys and mobile games.

MadRat had launched the prototype of SuperSuit at Consumer Electronic Show (CES) 2016 in Vegas this January. The company has now opened the early bird registrations for the game. The gaming platform SuperSuit is said to be world’s first wearable gaming platform that reduces screen time, increases social interaction, physical activities and takes kids & families outdoors to play with each other. SuperSuit will launch its pre-order campaign in September this year.

Rajat Dhariwal, Co-Founder & CEO of SuperSuit, said, “Outdoor gaming is slowly losing its relevance owing to the shrinking outdoors in urban spaces and safety concerns in suburbs. We are determined to bring back gaming in its true avatar by amalgamating the concept of outdoor gaming with gesture-control technology. We are excited to have toy industry veteran Alice & UX expert Rajiv on board the SuperSuit team with a shared vision of an active and balanced childhood.”

Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal had invested about $1 Mn in the company in November 2014 and later Snapdeal’s founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal had invested about $168K in July 2015. Previously, it had raised more than $500K from Blume Ventures and First Light Ventures in 2012.

With SuperSuit, the startup is aiming to crack the wearable video gaming market. Rajat recently told ToyNews that the indoor gaming market (both toys and video games) is about $180 Bn and the outdoor sector around $145 Bn and with SuperSuit MadRat is expecting to carve out an untapped $100 Bn and upwards market.

In April, Alibaba backed UCWeb, under its accelerator ‘9 Apps Dev’, has launched a $20 Mn fund for Indian gaming startups. Last September, Gurgaon-based GameXS, a pre-owned game store had raised an undisclosed amount of angel round funding from Lead Angels.

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