Mobile gaming startup Flixy Games raises $425K in seed funding

Mobile games publisher Flixy Games Pvt Ltd has raised $425,000 (Rs 2.8 crore) in seed funding from Rebright Partners, a Japan-based venture capital firm.

Flixy will use the funds to expand the team, develop art work and hire art contractors, analytics to track user behavior and add servers at the back-end, Felix Manojh, founder of Flixy Games, told TechCircle.

The startup has also tied up with Japanese gaming studio Axelmark to launch its first game, Avatars Clash: Comet on Mahaar. "Our plan is to launch a total of four games by next May. The next game, a third-person shooter game, will come out in November or December," said Manojh.

Flixy Games publishes free-to-play games and monetizes via in-app purchases and virtual currencies for game upgrades, in order to enhance users' gaming experience. Manojh said the firm will not use banner and interstitial ads because that creates a bad gaming experience for users. "We might experiment with watch-to-earn ads. A user makes a conscious decision to watch an ad and the user gets currency for watching the ad," he explained.

Flixy, which has a team of six people, is led by Manojh, a former product manager at Zynga, who established the firm in March 2016. At Zynga, he worked on multiple live mobile games.

The gaming space in India has seen considerable activity in the past few months. Till date, 41 private and venture capital deals worth $78 million (Rs 518 crore) have been announced in this segment, according to VCCEdge, the data research platform of VCCircle.

Last month, Pune-based hospitality firm Delta Corp Ltd acquired Gaussian Networks Pvt Ltd, which runs online poker site adda52.com. The deal valued Gaussian Network at $27 million (Rs 182 crore).

In June, Ratan Tata, Ola founders Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, Freshdesk chief executive Girish Mathrubootham, and Flipkart chief executive Binny Bansal invested an undisclosed amount in Bangalore-based startup MadRat Games Pvt Ltd. The company offers board and puzzle games to help children learn educational topics through gaming.

In April, mobile entertainment firm Nazara Technologies, along with others, invested an undisclosed amount in London-based mobile games studio TrulySocial. It also picked up a 26% stake in London-based mobile gamingstudio Mastermind Sports Ltd.

In an interaction with TechCircle earlier this year, Nazara CEO Manish Agarwal had said that the traditional and largest business model in the Indian gaming industry is subscription services or value-added services via mobile phones. The other model is through ads and in-app purchases. While in-app purchases are yet to pick up in India, the ad model dominates in the freemium space and subscription is popular with consumers at the bottom of the pyramid, Agarwal had said.

*This article has been updated to include comments from the company's founder.

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