Manish Agarwal and Ishank Gupta Raise INR 160 Crore to Acquire IndiGG

Manish Agarwal and Ishank Gupta, today announced fundraising of INR 160 Crore at a valuation of INR 1200 Crore for their new Web3 gaming venture, Kratos Studios. The seed round was led by Accel, with participation from investors including Prosus Ventures, Courtside Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, and others. Nazara Technologies, where Manish was formerly the CEO, has also invested in this round with an intent to collaborate with IndiGG on the web3 front. The acquisition was completed through a token swap by co-founders Manish Agarwal and Ishank Gupta.

Kratos Studios seeks to tap into an audience of over 500 million in South Asia

IndiGG is a blockchain-based gaming community Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) that is building distribution rails in emerging markets for global Web3 games. IndiGG is starting out with South Asia and aims to leverage the disposal time and skill of over 500 million users in the region.

AFK Gaming talked to former Nazara Technologies CEO Manish Agarwal about the acquisition and he shared more details with regards to this acquisition, “The whole premise of our goals relies on 3 Ds - decentralization, demand, and demographics. We are starting out in India and aim to tap into South Asia and beyond.” 

He added, “We want to distribute quality games and reduce the friction of onboarding gamers to our web3 platform. Gamers don’t need to know about the technology and can simply focus on having fun and creating assets that reward them. They need to be able to trade their assets and earn in INR. We will offer additional services that convert crypto to INR and also educate our audience about the assets if they want to know more about the web3 technology.”

Manish revealed that there are over 40 games lined up already including a first person shooter, a real-time strategy game, a clan-based game coming up. He also feels that while we transition from web2 to web3 we will have a "web2.5" phase as we transition. Games will adapt a "freemium" model with players getting to play for free with optional purchases available.

Manish also said, "We want to publish games that evolve over time and we will listen to the community feedback to improve our titles. We do not want to launch a new token immediately and will be focusing on establishing a quality experience first. Existing token holders of the Indi.gg tokens will get full value returns based on their dollar investments made to the platforms."

The underlying technologies in the web3 space need to improve. A lot of web3 games were developed by studios who wanted to get in on the crypto craze. But the trend is changing with seasoned web2 developers moving to the web3 space and they are developing quality games. Projects that are simply trying to create a paywall friction for NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) are not going to work anymore and quality projects will shine through according to Kratos Studios.

Ishank Gupta said in the official press release, “The IndiGG stack will partner with existing gaming micro-communities in South Asia, both on-ground and online, as sub-DAOs in the IndiGG ecosystem. These micro-communities will facilitate explosive community growth for global Web3 games.”

The funding will help them build distribution rails in emerging markets for global Web3 games. Additionally, the DAO will also invest in the most promising Web3 games across the world. Manish and Ishank will continue to work closely with Polygon’s co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and Yield Guild Games (YGG)’s co-founder Gabby Dizon towards the mission of building the largest gaming DAO in the world.