Matrix invests in India's Red Monster

The business was founded by CEO Kunal Kapur - former senior product manager with US game firm Zynga and founder of classifieds site SnatchKing Online - and CTO Kiran Upadhya, who also worked at Zynga as well as at SupportSoft, Wipro and BMC India.

Red Monster focuses on developing social mobile games catering to the Indian market. Starting with casino games, it plans to expand into other genres of social gaming, including original IP-led games. Currently, one of its most successful titles is Real Teen Patti - a simulated gambling game based around an Indian variation of poker.

"We believe that the market is opening up in terms of user base and monetization, leading to a massive India-focused social gaming opportunity - our first game Real Teen Patti is a step in this direction," Kapur in a statement. "We decided to partner with Matrix Partners India as we believe they will give us the necessary edge to win in this market."

The India mobile gaming industry is gathering pace. A report put out by Avendus Capital in September last year predicts that mobile games and applications will be be a INR27 billion market by 2016, driven by strong smart phone growth and an expanding 3G user base.

Accordingly, VC investments in the space have  started to pick up. In June, Sequoia Capital provided $15 million in Series A funding to Octro, a developer that takes classic offline games and launches them on mobile platforms. Prior to that Nazara Technologies - a game developer and publisher - said it was launching a INR200 million seed-stage fund to back game developers in the country.

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• Topics
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