Mobile gaming firm Mech Mocha gets $1M from Blume, Flipkart

Mobile gaming company Mech Mocha Game Studios Pvt Ltd has raised $1 million in seed funding, the Bangalore-based startup's co-founder and CEO told VCCircle on Wednesday.

Arpita Kapoor said the funding from Blume Ventures and e-commerce firm Flipkart will help the startup expand its team to 20 from 11 in next six months, build games and develop a back-end platform that would include social and payment solutions for its games.

She said the company is in talks with payment solutions providers Paytm and Mobikwik as well as some telecom operators to build payment solutions. It is also in talks with international gaming companies to bring their games to India, she said.

Mech Mocha plans to raise its Series A round by mid-March, she added.

Separately, Flipkart said in a statement Mech Mocha will benefit from its expertise in scalable mobile platform development. "Both e-commerce and gaming have overlapping audience and we see multiple synergies that can benefit mutually," it said.

Mech Mocha is not the first gaming company which has received funding from Flipkart. In November last year, the e-commerce major backed offline gaming startup MadRat Games.

Kapoor, which launched the startup along with Mohit Rangaraju in 2014, said Mech Mocha is also planning to go hyperlocal in some time. "We are working on building an ethnographic intelligence framework to be able to quickly localise our games for different regions of India. This framework can then be used to build games for the mass market in India."

Kapoor said smaller cities and towns will be major growth drivers for the company. The startup aims to develop games for children in the age group of 6-15 years in urban and semi-urban areas, as well as youngsters and homemakers in urban areas. "Our target is to have 50 million active users in next two years."

Mech Mocha's first game was called 'Puppet Punch', which the company claimed clocked 100,000 downloads in its first four days of launch earlier this year. The startup claims this game is seeing transactions worth $1,000 a day on its platform.

The firm recently launched another game, Chhota Bheem - Himalayan Adventure, after acquiring exclusive rights for the upcoming eponymous movie based on a popular cartoon character.

In the gaming segment, Bangalore-based Moonfrog Labs Pvt Ltd raised $15 million from Tiger Global and existing investor Sequoia Capital in March. In December 2014, Sequoia backed another mobile game developer Octro -- creator of popular games like Teen Patti and Rummy -- with $15 million.