Bengaluru based gaming start-up Mech Mocha has raised a fresh round of funding from Blume Ventures and e-commerce giant Flipkart. With an aim to ‘Making India Play’, the company says that it wants to focus on all aspects of the gaming ecosystem – be it content, easy payments or the distribution for a complex market like India. The studio also plans to expand the team with the latest fund-raise and start work on multiple games which will be India focused and develop a backend platform which will include social and payment solutions for it games.
Started by Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Gwalior (IIITM) graduates Arpita Kapoor and Mohit Rangaraju, the company has identified top three problems of India’s gaming ecosystem – Lack of deeply culturalised content, efficient 1-click 1-rupee payments and weak alternatives to distribution – and its core opportunity area and is working towards solving all three of them over next few years.
“Smartphone penetration in India assures that mobile gaming will be huge, with major growth drivers being the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. So, we are working with a laser-sharp focus on understanding the mass Indian gamer in primarily three segments – Chintu (6-15 year olds in urban/semi-urban areas), youngsters and Bhabhi ji (homemakers in urban areas) – who already spend many hours on their mobile devices daily. Our current title has references of popular culture, local text gratifications in Hinglish and many other India-inspired assets which makes it highly relatable and engaging for the audience”, says Mech Mocha, co-founder and CEO, Arpita Kapoor.
Mech Mocha ventured into gaming with its debut game Puppet Punch, which was published by Kedoo Games for iOS. The game was highly appreciated for its art-style and the cultural references from different parts of the world. Recently, the company acquired the exclusive license of Green Gold Animation’s upcoming movie Chhota Bheem – Himalayan Adventure, and launched a mobile game around it for the Indian market.
“We are challenging both myths that exist in India’s gaming ecosystem today. One, that only globally hit games like Candy Crush Saga, or Casino/gambling games like Teen Patti work. Two, Indian users do not monetise well. We don’t want to be a Super Cell or King Games – the one-hit wonders of mobile gaming. India is a very large market to focus on the traditional hit-based model of gaming companies. We take inspiration from Asian giants like DeNA & Tencent Games who rule their respective local markets by making games that leverage local nuances like social gaming and popular culture,” added Arpita Kapoor.
This is the second funding that the company has received after it had raised funding from a group of angels, including Devendra Parulekar, partner at Ernst & Young; Sanjay Mehta, member of both Indian Angel Network and Mumbai Angels; Ravi Trivedi, founder of Srijan Capital; and another unnamed individual. The company then was working from tech accelerator of CIIE, IIM-A’s incubation centre in Ahmedabad and since have moved to Bengaluru with a new team in place expanding from a previous two people studio.
“Mech Mocha founders have actionable insights on this market due to continuous focus tests and market research the company has been engaged in. The company is investing actively in building India’s first ethnographic intelligence framework to be able to quickly localise their games for different regions of India. This framework combined with their unique alternate channels of acquiring users can then be used to build games for mass-market in India,” said Blume Ventures, principal, Arpit Agarwal.
“The team is one of the best I’ve seen in this domain. In Mech Mocha, we saw a perfect mix of young founders with infectious energy who are close to the market coupled with core team with collective experience of working on world-class mobile-products from King, Disney, Nickelodeon, Zynga, EA and Directi. Mech Mocha will benefit from Flipkart’s expertise in scalable mobile platform development. Both e-commerce and gaming have overlapping audience and thus we see multiple synergies that can benefit mutually,” said Flipkart, head of corporate development, Nishant Verman.