India's MPL closes Series E, hits $2.3b valuation

The company didn’t disclose the size of the round, but a Bloomberg report – referenced by MPL in a LinkedIn post – claimed it was $150 million. Dubai-headquartered Legatum Capital led the round, with participation from US-based Accrete Capital and Gaingels.

Existing investors such as Moore Strategic Ventures and RTP Global re-upped. Moore Strategic co-led MPL’s $95 million Series D with Hong Kong’s Composite Capital as recently as February. The post-money valuation at that time was $945 million.

It continues a surge in investor interest in mobile gaming that draws comparisons with the US. Much as the repeal of anti-sports betting legislation facilitated the rise of DraftKings and Skillz, MPL and Dream Sports have benefited from India’s Supreme Court upholding fantasy sports as games of skill.

Dream Sports closed a $400 million round in March, achieving a valuation of nearly $5 billion. It has raised more than $750 million to date. MPL has attracted $375 million since its founding in 2018. The company’s other backers include SIG, Go-Ventures, Base Partners, Telstra Ventures, Founders Circle, Play Ventures, MDI Ventures, Pegasus Tech Ventures, and Sequoia Capital India.

India’s mobile gaming apps focus on player-to-player competitions, whereby users create their own virtual teams based on real-life players participating in actual matches. Point scoring is based on on-field performance, and cash prizes are earned.

Despite the Supreme Court ruling, some Indian states have blocked MPL, citing bans on rummy and disputing previous decisions on the constitutionality of fantasy sports. To some degree, hedging this risk has been about diversification, with the MPL offering spanning dozens of casual games in addition to fantasy.

“The risk was there, but it wasn’t any different from what we saw with Skillz in the US. If you have a strong regulatory and legal team to help counsel, like any tech start-up should, we are very comfortable there,” Yash Patel, a general partner at Telstra Ventures, told AVCJ earlier this year.

“What we thought was a bigger factor was what we saw in terms of retention and engagement metrics. The cohorts of users that continued to play and the whales [big-spending app users] that emerged were consistent, so there was a lot of predictability of revenue, effectively stacking an annuity stream. We saw that with Skillz and we have started to see that with MPL.”

MPL brands itself as Asia’s largest e-sports and mobile gaming platform, with 80 million users, of which about 10 million are paid users. Most of them are based in India, but there are now five million users in Indonesia as well. In July, the company launched in the US and is targeting 300,000 users and $100 million in gross merchandise value by year-end, Bloomberg reported.

COVID-19 had a mixed impact on e-sports with the cancellation of many live gaming events offset by rising interest in online forms of entertainment. MPL’s emphasis on mass-market online play proved beneficial. Between March and the end of June – when India was under lockdown – users and revenue tripled.

“The pandemic thrust India’s gaming industry forward by at least 2-3 years,” said Sai Srinivas Kiran, the company’s co-founder and CEO.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Expansion
• Media
• Technology
• India
• TMT
• Growth capital
• Legatum Capital
• RTP Global