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QuriousBit Founders
Casual puzzle gaming studio QuriousBit has raised $2 million in a funding round led by Lumikai, a VC fund focused on gaming and Interactive Media, with participation from General Catalyst.
With this round of funding, the gaming studio aims to create a new benchmark in innovative puzzle games built in India for global audiences, while investing heavily in curating a stellar team to build a high-quality casual mobile gaming studio.
Why LumiKai invested in QuriousBit?
The founders of the studio, with their extensive experience and successful track record in the gaming industry, have collectively developed games that have achieved over 125 million installations and have generated combined revenue exceeding $350 million, including seven titles with positive EBITDA margins.
Before founding QuriousBit, Ram served as the Assistant General Manager at PlaySimple Games, a company renowned for its leadership in word games and was acquired by MTG for over $500 million in 2021.
Meanwhile, Shubham held the role of Principal Software Engineer at PlaySimple Games.
Salone Sehgal, Founding General Partner, Lumikai, said, “A fresh and innovative approach both in game design and distribution is imperative to achieve category leading success in the highly competitive global casual gaming market given current market conditions. Ram and Shubham’s deep thinking, category expertise, and design orientation deeply impressed us."
Lumikai is an Indian venture capital firm that is focused on investing in gaming and media companies. Some of its notable portfolio startups are Bombay Play (building social casual games from India for the world), Loco (India’s leading game streaming platform), Elo Elo (creator-led, social gaming, live streaming platform), Studio Sirah (mid-core strategy gaming studio), Supernova (Gen AI led AI tutor disrupting edtech) ) amongst others.
"At General Catalyst, we are believers in audacious founders from India building for the world. When we met Rama and Shubham, we became fans of their deep expertise, having driven the growth of PlaySimple's games to over $100M in revenues, resulting in one of the best exits in the Indian ecosystem to date," said Anand Chandrasekaran, Partner at General Catalyst.
What does QuriousBit do?
Founded by Ramakrishna Reddy Y L and Shubham Joshi, The Bengaluru-based studio aims to produce high-quality casual puzzle games for mobile platforms from India for the world.
The startup intends to build deep game mechanics, with a rich narrative, creating a personalized gaming experience, that is currently missing in puzzle games.
Ramakrishna Reddy Y L, Founder, of QuriousBit, said “We see a huge opportunity in casual puzzle games beyond match-3 and blast genres. We believe some of these genres are ripe to disrupt with innovative core gameplay mechanics and deeper narratives."
Ramakrishna said the startup aims to build a world-class gaming studio based out of India, entertaining global audiences.
The current landscape of the casual gaming market
The global mobile casual games market is worth about $18 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow 1.4x to $25 billion in 2027. Over the last few years, the gaming industry has seen the dominance of certain match3 games in the puzzle genre, with limited breakouts beyond match3 and blast-themed games.
QuriousBit said that it intends to emulate the successful playbook of breakout puzzle games across sub-genres in the casual gaming market which are untapped and underserved.
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