Indian web3 gaming studio Kratos raises seed round at $150M valuation, acquires IndiGG

Kratos Studios, a web3 gaming startup based in India, reached a valuation of $150 million in a seed funding round of $20 million.

Accel led the round, and other investors included Prosus Ventures, Courtside Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Nazara Technologies, Kratos said Thursday. The gaming startup also acquired IndiGG, a sub-DAO of Yield Guild Games DAO via a token swap, meaning existing INDI token holders will be swapped to new Kratos tokens.

“The new token will be launched in 12 months,” Kratos co-founder Manish Agarwal told The Block in an interview. “The current INDI token holders will be swapped for the dollar value they initially invested so that they don’t have to mark down their investment,” he said. Agarwal is the former CEO of Nazara, India’s first publicly listed gaming company.

IndiGG raised $6 million in funding in January 2022 from investors including Sequoia Capital India, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Variant Fund, Jump Capital, Animoca Brands and Alan Howard. Kratos was founded last September, and as part of the IndiGG acquisition, will continue to build the IndiGG brand as a gaming DAO, said Agarwal.

Expansion plans

“We believe after Polygon, IndiGG could be the next multi-billion dollar company, bringing billions of ad revenue to the exchequer of India and getting millions of earners in India and South Asia,” Agarwal said. “We will then aim to take that playbook to Africa, Southeast Asia, and some countries in the Middle East as well.”

Kratos’s business model brings game developers and gamers onto its platform, earning revenue from both sides. “We create on-chain profiles of gamers in the form of cohorts, and we let game developers design quests for gamers,” Ishank Gupta, another co-founder of Kratos, said in the interview. “Game developers pay us for listing their quests and gamers pay us for validation of their quests.”

Kratos also helps gamers with the off-ramping process that converts on-chain assets into fiat currency in their bank accounts, said Gupta.

Kratos launched the IndiGG app earlier this week and it aims to increase the number of participants on both sides with more games and more gamers, Gupta said.

Argarwal and Gupta said they will work closely with Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon toward the mission of “building the largest gaming DAO in the world.”