Rooter, a gaming & esports platform, raises $25M to scale its user base

New Delhi-based Rooter, a gaming and esports platform, has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round primarily for scaling its user base and game-streaming community to drive more growth in the organization.

Lightbox, March Gaming, Duane Park Ventures, 9Unicorns, ADvantage, Capital-A, and Goal Ventures led the new Series A round. Existing investors, including IeAD Sports and Health Tech Partners, also participated.

Apart from raising funds, The online gaming platform also facilitated the secondary sale for a few of its shareholders and an exit route for a few employees through ESOP buyback.

The online gaming platform previously had raised $1.7 million in a pre-Series A round in May 2020 from investors -- Paytm, Venture Catalysts, Rockstud Capital, Founder Bank Capital, Anthill Ventures, and leAD Sports & Health Tech Partners.

Founded in 2016 by Piyush Kumar and Dipesh Agarwal, Rooter, through its streamers and esports events, covers top online games like BGMI, Valorant, Call Of Duty, Free Fire, to name a few, on its platform.

At present, Rooter has over 8.5 million monthly active users and over 30 million downloads on its mobile application, the statement said. Around 1 million unique users create gaming content on the Rooter platform every month, it adds.

Rooter, which aims to establish a base of 500,000 professional game streamers, says it engages enthusiasts with user-generated live audio and video content in at least ten Indian languages across several sports.

“Rooter has been growing at a blistering pace over the last 18 months, in tandem with the ballooning mobile gaming market in India, and this fresh infusion of funds by such marquee domestic and international investors only validates our work,” said Piyush Kumar, Founder & CEO of Rooter.

“Our community of streamers has been witnessing amazing engagement on our platform, which has allowed us to increase our revenues in the last six months. Dipesh and I look forward to working with our supporters to make Rooter the largest gaming company in the country within the next two years," Piyush adds.

Speaking on the investment, Gregory Milken, Managing Partner at March Gaming, said: “The availability of cheap, fast, and reliable mobile data in India has resulted in a massive explosion of streaming services and digital content, and we believe Rooter is best-positioned to capture this expanding market as the clear platform of choice for game streaming. We are thrilled to make our first investment in India."

Salil Bhargava, Director at Duane Park said, “We have closely followed the gaming business in India for several years. We believe the game streaming business in India will see explosive growth.”

Rooter's top competitor Loco had also raised a funding of $9 million from PUBG developer Krafton in June last year. According to a report by RedSeer and Lumikai, India is expected to have 700 million gamers in the next three years.

Also Read:

• Kaleidofin raises $10M in funding led by Dell Foundation, others

Follow IndianStartupNews on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter for the latest updates from the startup ecosystem.