SuperGaming bags $15 million funding from Steadview Capital, Skycatcher, others

Indus Battle Royale title

Pune-based game development studio SuperGaming announced on August 6 that it has raised $15 million in a Series B funding round led by existing investor Skycatcher and new investor Steadview Capital.

The round, which values the gaming studio at $100 million, also saw participation from both new and existing investors, including a16z Speedrun, Bandai Namco 021 Fund, GFR Fund, Visceral Capital, IVC Japan, Korea's Neowiz, Brazil's Loud.gg, and Barings, among others.

Web3 firms and investors such as Polygon Ventures, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, Decentralised.co, 4th Revolution Capital, 32-Bit Ventures, King River Capital, Ryze Labs, Ed3n Ventures, Yield Guild Games co-founder Gabby Dizon, Inversion founder Santiago R Santos, Emfarsis, and Cristian Manea also participated in the financing round.

SuperGaming stated that this funding round includes prior commitments and investments from returning backers that include AET Japan and BACE Capital. The gaming studio had earlier raised $5.5 million in a Series A round in October 2021.

The capital raised will be used for global expansion of the studio's flagship Indus Battle Royale title, starting with Latin America in partnership with Loud.gg, a Brazilian esports organisation.

It will also be used to scale the company’s game development capabilities and for hiring, while continuing to create new original IPs and deepen its publisher partnerships, the firm said in a statement.

In addition, part of the proceeds will go towards scaling up SuperGaming's game engine and live ops platform, SuperPlatform, which was developed in partnership with Google Cloud.

Available to game developers as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, SuperPlatform offers a range of features including AI assisted game development and monetization tools, advanced analytics, and social systems across the lifecycle of live service games.

"We are at an inflection point where India's role in gaming evolves from a consumer market to a driving force in innovation, and this investment fuels that transition," said SuperGaming CEO Roby John in a statement.

"Indus Battle Royale is just our beginning. It is a showcase of quality and scale that we can achieve. But our deeper mission is to empower the gaming ecosystem through SuperPlatform. We're providing developers worldwide with the tech backbone to bring their most ambitious visions to life, including seamless integration of Web3," he said.

Indus Battle Royale, heavily inspired by Indian culture and mythology with the Indus Valley civilisation as its backdrop, was launched in October 2024.

The title is set in ‘Indo-Futurism,’ which the company describes as a futuristic world that is “unapologetically Indian in its exploration and representation of science fiction”. Supergaming claims the title has garnered over 9 million downloads across the Google Play store and the iOS App Store to date.

The game belongs to the battle royale genre, which in India is dominated by Krafton's Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) and Garena's Free Fire, with other notable players including Epic Games-owned Fortnite, Microsoft's Call of Duty, and Respawn Entertainment's Apex Legends.

“We led SuperGaming's Series A round in 2021 and are now leaning into our original thesis with a recent financing round. Our thesis is straight forward, India is the fastest growing gaming market globally and from that will emerge the next global giants in gaming," said Sia Kamalie, founder, Skycatcher.

"Our first round was about scaling development capabilities and this round is now about scaling global and unique hyper-local publishing approaches. I'm excited about the multiple product launches the team has planned for Latin America and the Middle East this year," Kamalie added.

SuperGaming is also making a push into Web3 gaming through a partnership with B3 GameChain, a gaming-optimised Layer-3 blockchain built on Base, the Ethereum Layer-2 network incubated by Coinbase.

The company said this integration will enable it to serve both Web2 and Web3 players simultaneously across its games portfolio, including the social deduction title Silly Royale, which is now live on SuperGaming's own Layer-3 Superchain powered by B3.

SuperGaming had previously dabbled with Web3 through a game called TCME (Tower Conquest: Metaverse Edition, previously called Ethernia) that was launched in 2022, ahead of the global digital asset downturn led by crypto rout. The title was subsequently shut down.

Founded by John, Christelle D'cruz, Sreejit J, Navneet Waraich, and Sanket Nadhani in 2019, SuperGaming has also developed popular games such as the multiplayer shooter title MaskGun, tower defence game Tower Conquest, and shooting title Battle Stars. The company states these titles have clocked over 200 million installs to date.