Gaming community platform Turnip raises $12.5M to expand presence globally

Mobile-focused gaming community platform Turnip has raised $12.5 million or Rs 92 crore in a new Series A funding round to scale its presence across geographies, hiring talent, and product development.

US-based Greenoaks and Elevation Capital led the new round. Other investors -- SEA Capital, Vibe Capital, and leading founders, including Andrew Chen (Partner, a16z), Harshil Mathur & Shashank Kumar (Razorpay), Akshay Kothari (Notion), Geige Vandentop (Streamyard), Vidit Aatrey & Sanjeev Barnwal (Meesho), Gaurav Munjal & Roman Saini (Unacademy), Lalit Keshre, Ishan Bansal & Harsh Jain (Groww), Kalyan Krishnamurthy (Flipkart), and Sujeet Kumar (Udaan), also participated.

Elevation Capital is the returning investor in the startup. Prior to this, Elevation Capital had participated in a seed round of $1.6 million in the Bengaluru-based mobile gaming platform.

Founded in April 2020 by IIT-Guwahati alumni Pooja Dubey and Aditya Sharma with an aim to reimagine the future of gaming interaction by helping creators build communities that turn game streaming into a highly interactive, social, and engaging activity.

Turnip allows gaming creators to form clubs, where they can stream or record their gameplay for audiences, talk on audio/video, text each other, run e-sports tournaments, and host masterclasses.

The platform supports a diversity of creators, including live streamers, montage creators, esports organizations, college clubs, and groups of friends. Apart from this, It also allows its users to stream and monetize their interactive experiences on existing platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch.

With this round of funding, Turnip is aiming to scale its presence across geographies, including Southeast Asia and Latin America by the end of this year. The startup claims to have witnessed phenomenal growth in the past 12 months, growing its user base from 250,000 users in 2020 to more than 5 million users in 2021 — over 60% of this growth has been organic, it says.

Additionally, 45% of the total user base is from outside of India, spanning geographies, including Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, the US, and Europe. 

“Our goal is to build from India for the 2 billion+ gamers spread across the world. Gamers have been early adopters of technologies and this has created some of the most innovative and immersive consumer products globally — Discord, Streamlabs, Unity, Twitch, Axie Infinity, etc. We want to continue on this same legacy and become the global default home for mobile gaming communities," Pooja Dubey and Aditya Sharma said in a joint statement.

Speaking on the investment, Neil Shah, Partner at Greenoaks, said: “Turnip is building a platform that transforms passive viewers into an actively engaged community, delighting fans while enabling new options for creators, from subscriptions to events, to sponsorships and more. By nailing the mobile experience, we believe Turnip has democratized access for users across the world, letting anyone be a creator or a fan, no matter their device or hardware."

"Turnip’s spectacular growth and global reach in the past year further cements our belief in their vision and we are thrilled to reaffirm our partnership in this latest funding round," Mayank Khanduja, Partner, Elevation Capital, added.

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