Four other funds—9Unicorns, ADvantage, Capital-A and Goal Ventures—also invested in the round, along with IeAD Sports & Health Tech Partners.
“We will use the capital in three areas: increasing user growth, creating a robust content creator ecosystem, and building a marketplace,” said Piyush, founder and chief executive of Rooter.
Founded by Piyush Kumar and Dipesh Agarwal, Rooter has emerged as the largest player in the Indian gaming category with 8.5 million monthly active users and more than 30 million downloads, making it the No. 1 app in the ‘sports’ category on the Google Play Store since October 2020.
About 2.5 million streamers have joined Rooter since July 2021.
The company extensively covers games such as BGMI, Free Fire, Valorant and Call of Duty through its streamers and e-sports tournaments. About one million unique users create gaming content on the Rooter platform every month. “We aim to emerge as the dominant player in India’s creator economy by building a base of the next 500,000 professional game streamers,” said Rooter CEO Piyush Kumar.
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According to a report released by RedSeer and Lumikai, India is expected to be home to 700 million gamers by 2025.
“Gaming is the future of social media for the next generation. 92% of Gen Z and millennials play games. And these ‘gamers’ are more engaged, more invested and far more eager to contribute to gaming platforms than any traditional social media user today,” said Sid Talwar, partner at Lightbox.
The Rooter app has seen users spend 35 minutes on average on the app. About 3% monthly users spend about Rs 12 a month on the app.
While globally there are dedicated gameplay streaming platforms such as Twitch TV, Smashcast, Hitbox and Beam, a lot of players prefer YouTube and Facebook.
In India, YouTube is one of the biggest platforms for game streaming, while a few startups have also sprung up in the past three years, including Rheo TV and Loco, apart from Rooter.
Experts said gaming would be one of the fastest growing entertainment segments in India, driven by the young population.
“We have closely followed the gaming business in India for several years. We believe the game streaming business in India will see explosive growth,” said Salil Bhargava, director at Duane Park.
In May 2020, Rooter raised $1.7 million (about Rs 12.8 crore) in a pre-series A round from a clutch of new and existing investors, including Paytm, Adidas Family-backed fund leAD Sports, Rockstud Capital, Founder Bank Capital, an early stage arm of RB Investments, Anthill Ventures, Venture Catalysts and other angel investors.
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