Speciale Invest to fund online poker platform Pocket52

Bangalore-based online poker platform Pocket52, has taken a major step in evolving the Random Number Generator technology. Speciale Invest led an investor group to raise an undisclosed seed fund for Pocket52.

The Bangalore-based company run by IIT Bombay graduate Nitesh Salvi along with other co-founders – Saurav Suman (COO), Debashish Bhattacharjee (CMO) and Satyam Verma (CTO) – wants to use their funds in planning an expanding consumer business.

Nitesh’s first venture Plancess, which was one of the top-ranked Ed-tech startups, was later acquired by the Career Point Group of Kota. Nitesh, who has been a poker player from his IIT Bombay days, took up building a poker space online after a decade of unsatisfactory experiences. Nitesh, along with the founding team, aims to reconstruct the online poker experience with the help of ‘Data and Machine Learning’.

Arjun Rao, general partner at Speciale Invest said, “Pocket52’s vision to bring technological innovations to the Indian online gaming sector is encouraging. They have a strong product differentiation around the game-play. Their integrity levels, fairness, and high-quality player engagement strengthen our confidence in them.”

Rao mentioned a special feature about the poker platform. “The RNG+ technology, employed by Pocket52,  is an additional security layer in their online card shuffle process. They drew this technological inspiration from some noteworthy companies like Cloudflare, which is a platform that acts as a medium to secure 10% of the entire world wide web,” Rao said.

The funding is another initiative to promote the gaming industry in India. As per a study by KPMG and GoogleIndia published in May 2017, the market value of the Indian gaming industry is about $300 million. Out of this, the estimated value of the online poker space in India is $7 million.