Using the new capital, Bombay Play plans to scale its existing ‘hypersocial’ games and support upcoming projects.
Bombay Play, a game development company, has secured $7 million in a Series A fundraising round headed by Kalaari Capital, with participation from investors including Winzo, AdvantEdge VC, and AMEA Ventures.
Lumikai Fund, Leo Capital, and PlayCo, all existing investors, also joined in the investment round. Bombay Play has already raised over $9.5 million in cash, including a $1.5 million round in June 2020 and a $1 million round in December 2020.
“We want our games to exist in places where you’re already talking to your friends and interacting socially. That means being on platforms like Facebook or WhatsApp, and being just one tap away from joining a session or a tournament. They can just tap a link and play against my score” Jones said.
Bombay Play, founded in 2018 by Oliver Jones and Abhas Saroha, specialises in the hypersocial gaming genre, which includes HTML5-based casual games that are created with a social-first approach and are instantly playable across many devices.
Bombay Play has created games such as Dice Merge Puzzle, Card Party, and a Wordle-like word puzzle called Daily Word Puzzle, which have a total of 40 million players worldwide, according to the business.
Jones previously co-founded Moonfrog Games (which was bought by Sweden’s Stillfront last year), where he helped create the famous card game Teen Patti Gold. He has also been the head of game design at Glu Mobile and Zynga. Saroha has previously led engineering teams at Moonfrog, Zynga, and MakeMyTrip.
“We’re building what we call an innovation factory out of India, and we feel this really plays to the development strengths of India” he said “Our model is to consolidate, find the best creative talent we can and work with content partners to create hypersocial games and publish them on Bombay Play”
The startup intends to utilise the new funds to expand its existing ‘hypersocial’ gaming offerings and support prospective ventures, with a portion of the revenues also going into segment research and development. In addition, by the conclusion of the next fiscal year, the company intends to more than quadruple its current staff base of 50 employees.
According to Jones, this additional funding will allow them to twofold their development capacity while also tenfolding their earnings.
