Consumer internet startup, Hike, has announced another round of fundraising from marquee web3 investors. Led by Jump Crypto, the round also saw participation from Tribe Capital and Republic Capital’s Republic Crypto.

The company has not disclosed the funds raised by the three investors. However, it plans to use most of these funds to further build their Rush Gaming Universe (RGU). According to the press note, RGU is a social gaming metaverse where users can use their skills to ‘Play, Earn & Grow.’ 

According to Hike, In just 13 months since launch, the Rush Gaming Universe is clocking in over 160 million gameplays every quarter, with over $90 million in gross winnings annually across 1.8 million monthly active users (MAUs).

The Hike press note said players will be able to participate in a new kind of game economy where they can not only play games, but also generate digital assets based on the outcome of gameplay. 

In an interaction with BusinessLine Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder & CEO, Hike said, “Blockchain will do for India, what manufacturing did for China. Imagine if even 30 per cent of the wealth generated by the country was in the hands of Indian citizens using technologies like blockchain. At RGU, gamers will be empowered to become true owners of the networks and economies they help create.”

Mittal also mentioned that Hike will be introducing tokens (a digital currency) in the RGU later this year, “All of the first iterations of everything we want in the metaverse will be live by the end of this year,” he said. 

According to the press release, the role of investors will be in building RGU’s vision for web3 gaming, Jump Crypto will serve as the market maker to help the platform navigate exchanges, and Tribe Capital comes with years of expertise in the web3 world, while Republic Crypto will act as a token advisory and sale partner.

Hike recently rolled out Rush Avatar NFTs for the RGU community and announced that it was partnering with Polygon as it builds a fully scalable and cost-effective web3 mobile gaming platform to onboard the next 1 billion+ non-web3-native users to the blockchain. The Rush Avatar NFT project is ranked sixth among the top NFT projects on Polygon. 

Speaking on the funding, Mittal said, “We are thrilled to welcome Jump Crypto, Tribe Capital, and Republic Crypto as investors who share our vision for the impact Gaming + Web3 can have on the world. Gaming to us has always been bite-sized entertainment and now it can also be a means to provide brand new economic opportunities to the world. India being a mobile-first market, needs a unique approach and our years of building for this market helps tremendously in building a seamless user experience to bring the next billion users into the chain. We’re incredibly excited about the future.”  

Saurabh Sharma, Partner at Jump Crypto, said, “We are one of the earliest and most active investors in the crypto ecosystem. Having witnessed the maturation of this paradigm, we believe web3 gaming is one of the canonical use cases of a crypto driven economy. Hike’s Rush Gaming Universe is an exciting development for emerging markets like India and it’s their unique mobile-only vision with a focus on building a seamless web3 user experience for the next billion users that’s incredibly exciting.” The Rush Gaming Universe is already one of the fastest-growing gaming ecosystems in India. This latest round of funding will be deployed to expand on RGU’s innovative product strategy, along with enabling high-quality hiring across functions.

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