![]() Over the next few days, as the rooftop started to get crowded and players jostled, the co-founders introduced a nominal entry fee of ₹5. The pilot was a success, the contestants got hooked, and the word spread like wild fire. “I always believed that there should be a platform where people can compete in games and large tournaments,” says Sai. The rooftop happened to be the playing arena, the first set of players were cooks working for the co-founders and their friends, and the weapons for battle were loaded mobiles with games. “We raised money even before we started the company,” he says.Īnd when the co-founders did start, or let’s call it tested the waters-it was absolutely an out-of-the-box idea. A bunch of existing ones, including Sequoia, backed the gaming venture even before its birth. ![]() And we are just beneficiaries of that.” What the founder, who started MPL with Shubham Malhotra in 2018, was also a beneficiary of was having almost the same set of investors who had invested in his previous venture. “That’s the greatest aspect of the internet. “It can scale very fast and in a large manner,” he says. With a robust and smooth payment infrastructure in the country, the business can soar. “They are not like the physical brick-and-mortar businesses where you have to set up distribution,” he says. Sai underlines what gives an edge-read scale-to internet businesses. “If you’re in the right place at the right time, and you have the right product-market fit,” he explains, “then you churn out crazy numbers.” The serial entrepreneur, who sold his mobile tech business to Hike in 2017, seems to have hit gold with his gaming venture, his third since he started his entrepreneurial journey by co-founding web and entertainment services Base9 in 2009. “That’s how the internet works, my dear friend,” he says, grinning from ear to ear on a Zoom call from Bengaluru. Sai Srinivas, co-founder and chief executive officer of MPL, explains the magic behind the ‘crazy’ growth. Now the gaming unicorn offers over 60 games in multiple categories such as fantasy sports, sports games, puzzle, casual and board games, and claims to have over 90 million registered users across India, Asia, Europe and North America. Last September, it raised a Series E round from Legatum Capital at a pre-money valuation of $2.3 billion. Though expenses almost doubled to ₹628 crore, the startup brought down its losses from ₹295 crore in FY20 to ₹130 crore in FY21. OneRare: Meet the world's first food metaverseĪ year later, in FY21, revenues leapfrogged over 22 times to ₹499 crore. Fast forward 12 months, and the revenues jumped to ₹22.5 crore in FY20. The startup, which started with fruit-cutting and puzzle games along with a bunch of casual games like Ludo, added fantasy sports to its kitty in March 2019. For FY19-the fiscal was just six months of operations as the startup officially opened account in September 2018-MPL’s number stood at ₹2.87 crore. It is, however, the third thing that puts MPL in a league of its own. Second, and no marks for guessing, would be the visual of former India cricket captain Virat Kohli dancing to a catchy jingle in a TV commercial that the online gaming and esports platform bombarded heavily during the 2019 IPL, just six months after the Bengaluru-based startup rolled out operations. What are the three things that strike you most about the Mobile Premier League (MPL)? First, obviously, would be its name, which has a rhyming similarity with the IPL (Indian Premier League). Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India (From left) Shubham Malhotra and Sai Srinivas, co-founders of Mobile Premier League, are now focusing on developing India-centric games
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