Gaming infra startup GameRamp raises $5.4 million pre-seed funding led by Bitkraft Ventures

GameRamp was founded by Vivek Ramachandran and Sashank Vandrangi in April. Ramachandran, the CEO of GameRamp, previously led new product initiatives at the US-based game publisher Electronic Arts (EA) and Canadian gaming studio Big Viking Games. He also led consumer tech investments at early-stage venture capital firm Z47, formerly Matrix Partners India.

Vandrangi has worked with companies such as skill gaming unicorn Mobile Premier League (MPL) and Candy Crush developer King.

"Our mission at GameRamp is to decentralise publishing. We provide the necessary tools and capital for small developers building a game or an app to bring their product to market," Ramachandran told Moneycontrol in an interview.

While the startup primarily targets video-game developers, it also caters to consumer-app developers in sectors such as edtech, media and entertainment that operate similar business models, he said.

AI has made it easier for developers to create their curated app experiences by significantly lowering production barriers. However, distribution has become more challenging due to increased competition, making monetisation harder, Ramachandran said.

"GameRamp’s team embodies a blend of deep expertise across machine learning, product growth and investing. They have a unique perspective on what it takes to win in hyper-competitive markets, and their obsession with developer outcomes shows in their early customer love," Anuj Tandon, Partner at Bitkraft, said.

GameRamp is one of Bitkraft's first lead investments in the region, as the US-based early-stage investor sharpens focus on emerging markets like India, which is among the fastest-growing gaming markets globally.

'Monetisation copilot'

GameRamp's product acts as a “monetisation copilot”, helping developers automate their revenue strategies through a suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) and AI agents, Ramachandran said.

"Being able to help developers make money is the essential ingredient in helping them scale. If they're not able to generate meaningful revenue, they cannot scale," he said.

"The days when VCs were funding companies purely because they were exciting are over. They have to be able to crack distribution, and distribution cannot be cracked if they are not able to crack monetisation from day one."

GameRamp’s product enables personalisation on a one-to-one basis, allowing developers to tailor monetisation strategies to each individual user globally.

"Every customer who is using the app will have a completely personalised experience in terms of how their monetisation journey is going to be. Depending on the user, the market they’re coming from, how long they have been using the app, and whether they are a loyal user or not, they get a variation in experience," Ramachandran said.

This level of personalisation is made possible by deploying "hundreds of reinforcement learning (RL) agents" within an app’s ecosystem, he added.

"We ingest user-level behavioural data or telemetry data. Our machine-learning (ML) models then train and provide recommendations on the specific ad configuration each user should see, which is delivered in a fully autonomous way," he said.

Developers can access these tools by integrating the startup's software development kit (SDK) into their apps. GameRamp is available to customers through a waitlist, with a public launch expected in the next two months.

The startup has 10 to 15 customers with a waitlist of more than 100 developers.

"We are only targeting games where people will build deep relationships with the game over many years... That is when it becomes a real business and not an entertainment project," Ramachandran said.

GameRamp plans to build features that expand across the entire return on ad spend (ROAS) spectrum, including advertising optimisation and lifetime value (LTV) optimisation. The startup also plans to expand to markets such as Japan and South Korea.