Skill-based gaming start-up Zupee, founded by IIT Kanpur graduates Dilsher Singh Malhi and Siddhant Saurabh, has raised $8 million in a Series A funding round. The capital raised from this round will be used to invest deeper in technology, team and marketing.

Matrix Partners India led this investment round with participation from Falcon Edge Capital, WestCap Group, Orios Venture Partners and Zupee’s early stage investor, Smile Group.

Zupee runs live quiz tournaments on its app, in which users compete with friends and other players for prizes. The Zupee app has more than 2,000 live quiz tournaments running through 24 hours every day, covering over 100 topics that range from Bollywood, to Hollywood, sports, math, spelling, and Hinglish, among others.

“Zupee has built a truly unique mobile-gaming product that allows players to showcase their knowledge, while at the same time tap into their intrinsic need to compete with their friends and other gamers. India leads the world in mobile game downloads with more than 5 billion downloads in 2019. Zupee’s strong growth in users and total gameplay is a testament to the potential of the platform” said Tarun Davda, Managing Director, Matrix India.

The online gaming market is growing at 40 per cent annually and is expected to reach $14 billion in India by 2025. In the last 12 months, Zupee claims that its growth has galloped past the industry, with the app’s user base and gross transaction volume (GTV) growing at over 100 and 700 times respectively.

Dilsher Singh Malhi, CEO of Zupee, said, “Our strong growth in the last year has reaffirmed our faith in building a gaming app that combines people’s love for trivia and quizzes with a chance to win real money. This is why we are thrilled to welcome marquee names like Matrix, Falcon Edge, WestCap and Orios as new investors in Zupee. We are geared to serve 100 million users and be a leader in skill-based gaming in India.”

The Zupee app is currently available in both English and Hindi and has seen over five million downloads as of April 1, 2020. The app sees over 10 million gameplays every month.

Last year, Zupee announced that it had raised $1 million in seed funding from Smile Group, which incubated the start-up. “Gaming is the future of entertainment and we were lucky to back Zupee’s extremely talented founders in our venture builder platform” said Harish Bahl, founder and Chairman of Smile Group.

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