Participated · Equity · Jan 2024

Shopkirana is a B2B grocery firm that sells groceries directly to kirana merchants and provides brands with market knowledge and distribution support. Founded in Indore in 2015, it concentrated on tier-2 cities after tests in Mumbai and Indore. The startup operates in eight cities across Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat and serves 50,000 kirana outlets. Co-founders Deepak Dhanotiya, Sumit Ghorawat and Tanutejas Saraswat are former consumer-products executives. The company says it has perfected a methodology to launch in a new location every 15 days and follows a 'solve first, scale afterwards' approach to preserve unit economics. According to co-founder Sumit Ghorawat, Shopkirana is the first in the segment to reach operational break-even. Management plans to take the business to a national scale, targeting adoption by kirana stores, legacy consumer-goods brands and D2C brands. ShopKirana is an Indore-based B2B e-commerce platform that connects retailers and brands through a mobile app. The platform enables retailers to buy in real time, track stock on their phones, reduce inventory and generate better sales. It also provides services such as logistics, banking and loan facilities, and recently launched its own staples labels. According to the company, it operates across 30 cities, empowers about 100,000 retailers and claims to impact roughly 50 million customers across six states. ShopKirana competes with players including Jumbotail, Gramfactory and Udaan. With new funding the company plans to bolster operations in major tier-II cities, which the article notes account for 30% of India’s population. ShopKirana is an app-based B2B e-commerce platform that integrates retailer demand and connects retailers directly with brands and suppliers to secure competitive prices and single sourcing. The platform services grocery and FMCG stakeholders and provides value-added services including logistics, banking, loans, IT and ordering systems. It aggregates retailer orders and passes them to brands, enabling promotions and product launches directly to small shopkeepers. The company says it will use the new capital to expand operations to 10 more cities over the coming year. ShopKirana is targeting one lakh retailers as part of its expansion plans. The startup was founded in February 2015 and is based in Indore.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2022

YGG Japan operates GabeeTown, a web3 game-specific platform that curates domestic and foreign blockchain games to help even beginners start playing. The company positions itself to move Japanese users from “Play to Earn” toward a broader “Play and Earn” market and to support Japanese game publishers in global launches. YGG Japan is building onboarding tools, media functions (GabeeTown is in alpha), wallets and other infrastructure to lower entry barriers and reduce scam risk for web3 novices. Its future plans emphasize product development, marketing/promotion, and recruitment of specialists (engineers, token economists, product marketers, BizDev, PR) to scale operations and communities. Financially, the platform has raised a cumulative total of approximately $5.75 million, including a recent private placement of about $2.95 million. ForN Inc., established in November 2021 and headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo, is the operating partner of YGG Japan and provides marketing, tool development, and infrastructure support. YGG Japan is a subDAO of Yield Guild Games formed to promote blockchain gaming across Japan and to curate and create localized content for Japanese players. It partners with ForN, a DAO-structured game guild service optimized for Japanese gaming culture, and has an exclusive partner relationship with ForN. The subDAO plans to scale the blockchain game market in Japan by developing guild participation services, strengthening partnerships with existing guilds, offering scholarship programs for locally developed games, and providing smoother onboarding to Web3. YGG Japan will also provide development and marketing support for blockchain games using Japanese IP and work with local companies to build a pipeline of games to global users. The team includes Japan-based gaming and tech leaders such as CEO Tetsuya Fujiwara and other industry veterans. The company cites Japan’s market of 52.7 million gamers and a US$22.1 billion gaming market as the opportunity it aims to convert to blockchain gaming, and it recently secured funding to build entry-point products for mass gamers.

Participated · Series A · Oct 2021

DeHorizon is a metaverse game ecosystem led by gaming veterans and web3 experts that builds blockchain-based titles and NFT infrastructure. The company announced a strategic financing round led by Griffin Gaming Partners and Circle Ventures; the press release did not disclose the round size or instrument. This strategic round follows an $8.5 million Pre‑Series A in October 2021 led by Sfermion, Dragonfly Capital, and Everest Ventures Group. DeHorizon says the funding will help incubate a broader portfolio of games, expand the team, and iteratively grow the DeHorizon metaverse. Publicly announced titles include Team battle DeVerse, Battle royale DeTournament, and Dragon-racing DeMythical, with Effigy (a crowd‑sourced medieval fantasy) also in development. The company has launched DeMeta (an editable ERC‑721 NFT), debuted the Dr.De NFT on OpenSea (floor price 4 ETH at press time), begun an internal DeVerse test on Feb 22, 2022 with a 16,535,968 DVT prize pool, and announced partnerships with multiple crypto gaming guilds. DeHorizon Foundation is the team behind DeHorizon, a community-powered Game Metaverse focused on “Play for fun and to Earn.” Its flagship title, DeVerse, is described as the first blockchain-based MMO/RPG on DeHorizon, a high-fantasy action-adventure open-world where players mint NFT monsters, mine resources, undertake quests and tame creatures. The project emphasizes player control of assets, privacy information, and governance through a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). DeHorizon recently launched an interoperable, editable and evolvable ERC-721 DeMeta Pass ID NFT, with the first batch claimed in under 30 minutes. The organization plans to use new funding to accelerate DeVerse’s development and grow the team.

Participated · Series B · Nov 2018

Mech Mocha Game Studios is a Bengaluru-based mobile gaming startup focused on vernacular, conversation-driven social games. Its flagship product HelloLudo is a digital mobile version of Ludo built around in-game conversations. The company plans to use new funding to develop multiple vernacular gaming products initially targeting Hindi speakers and later expanding to other local languages. HelloLudo has surpassed 500,000 Android installs and the platform is generating roughly 15 million minutes of conversation per month. For FY 2017–18 the company reported a four-fold rise in gross revenues to Rs 60.96 lakh from Rs 13.94 lakh. Co-founder and CEO Arpita Kapoor said the business is closing the targeted sum soon and will deploy capital toward product development and expansion. Mech Mocha is an India-based mobile gaming firm that develops games for mobile devices. The company has raised $5 million in a Series A funding round. The round was led by Accel Partners and Shunwei Capital. Existing investor Blume Ventures also participated in the latest round. The article does not disclose product details, user metrics, revenue, or specific future plans. No other financial terms or past-round amounts were reported. Mech Mocha is a mobile gaming studio that builds games for children (age 6–15), youngsters and homemakers in urban and semi-urban India. Its first title, Puppet Punch, reportedly hit 100,000 downloads in its first four days and the company says that game is seeing about $1,000 a day in transactions. The firm recently launched Chhota Bheem - Himalayan Adventure after acquiring exclusive rights tied to the movie. Mech Mocha plans to build a back-end platform with social and payment solutions and is working on an ethnographic intelligence framework to quickly localize games for different Indian regions. The company says it will go hyperlocal over time and targets 50 million active users in the next two years. Mech Mocha was launched in 2014 by Arpita Kapoor and Mohit Rangaraju; Kapoor is the CEO. Mech Mocha was founded by IIIT Gwalior graduates Arpita Kapoor and Mohit Rangaraju and focuses on character-led, colorful, fast-paced casual free-to-play games. The studio uses a distributed collaboration model of artists, sound designers and animators who work remotely and share in game profits, which the founders say enabled production at roughly one-fifth the normal cost. Its first title, Puppet Punch, is about to launch after positive traction in tester groups, with kids and teens identified as the target market. The development team for Puppet Punch has six collaborators and two employees. The studio has generated buzz at events in Amsterdam and Chartboost University, and Arpita received a prominent female developer award from the Casual Games Association. Mech Mocha participated in the iAccelerator batch and has raised angel funding to support its launch.