CloudFeather Games, which provides real money gaming and Web3 tools for game developers, has raised $1.25 million in seed funding led by gaming and interactive media venture fund Lumikai.
The round also saw participation from early-stage venture capital firm Venture Highway and individual angel investors such as Nazara Technologies chief executive Manish Agarwal and Oyo's global chief strategy officer Maninder Gulati.
Started by Romi Chandra and Yash Chandra, CloudFeather Games is building a suite of competitive formats that aims to provide developers a new way of monetisation beyond in-app purchases and ads.
The startup said it has been building its developer software development kit (SDK) since January 2022 and has now started trials with external developers. It counts 9stacks, Baazi Games, Nostragamus and BalleBaazi among its clients.
"Casual games do not have meaningful monetization avenues outside of Ads and IAPs. Given this, there is room for disruption by providing a novel monetization avenue which supercharges game engagement, without developers needing to re-design their existing game economies" Romi Chandra said in a statement.
The startup's first suite of features includes a bounty hunting SDK with a multi-currency wallet layer, that allows anyone to create custom real money bounties around their in-game achievements for game communities to try and beat it, Chandra added.
CloudFeather Games plans to use the funds raised for hiring talent across various functions such as business development, product and technology as it scales its developer outreach programs both for domestic and global game studios. The startup said that it is currently in discussions with multiple global game studios to expand its network to hundreds of developers over the coming year.
Prior to starting CloudFeather Games, Romi Chandra was involved in building a poker network at Pocket52, an online poker platform.
"Romi and Yash have pioneered massive-scale system architectures for RMG (Real money gaming) platforms serving tens of millions of users. Leveraging their unique technical expertise in this space, they're building a suite of competitive tools for any game developer to supercharge community retention and monetisation, while also providing innovative and fun new experiences for gamers" said Justin Shriram Keeling, Founding General Partner, Lumikai.
Priya Mohan, Partner, Venture Highway, said, "Like with the case of dev tools and its growing importance, gaming focused tools has its own nuance and the founders’ prior domain experience adds to the strong founder-market fit. The increasing volumes of games and gamers only makes the case for deep engagement & interactivity stronger, the solution for which can be the “tools-in-a-box” that Cloudfeather is building"
