Tiger Global joins $12 million funding round for gamer infrastructure startup Lysto

Lysto, a blockchain startup that is building verification tools for gamers, has raised $12 million in a pre-Series A funding round.

Sharing the news exclusively with The Block on Tuesday, Lysto said venture capital firms Square Peg, Beenext and Hashed co-led the round, with Tiger Global and Better Capital participating.

Angel investors, including Balaji Srinivasan (former Coinbase CTO), Paul Veradittakit (Pantera Capital partner), Binny Bansal (Flipkart co-founder) and Bobby Ong and TM Lee (CoinGecko co-founders) also backed the round.

As part of the deal, Tushar Roy, a partner at Square Peg, has joined Lysto’s board of directors, Lysto’s founder and CEO Sadiq Ahamed told The Block in an interview.

With fresh equity capital in place, Lysto plans to continue building its gaming infrastructure platform called proof of play protocol. “We are building a protocol that will help gamers digitize their credentials on-chain and carry it wherever they go,” said Ahamed.

Like how in real life people showcase their physical and online certificates on LinkedIn or when applying for a job, similarly, gamers can showcase their on-chain credentials when planning to join games, said Ahamed. “Gamers can showcase their skill set through these credentials to join a game, form a team and join tournaments,” he said.

Lysto’s proof of play protocol is currently live on Polygon in the beta phase. The plan is to support almost all blockchains in the future, and expansion will start with Solana, ImmutableX and Flow, according to Ahamed.

Lysto caters to both web3 as well as web2 gamers, meaning traditional game players can also verify their credentials through the protocol, said Ahamed.

There are currently around 25 people working for Singapore-based Lysto, mostly from India, and Ahamed plans to hire some people in the business development role in the near future.

Lysto’s pre-Series A round brings its total funding to date to $15 million. The firm raised $3 million in seed capital in November last year.

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