Gaming app Turnip raises $1.63 million

Mumbai: Game lives-streaming and community platform Turnip on Thursday secured $1.63 million in seed stage funding from venture capital firm Elevation Capital and Better Capital.

Turnip plans to use the fund to expand its reach to more gamers by building a scalable and pioneering product. The startup also plans to recruit talent to build the future of gaming, it said in a statement. The app is available on Playstore. Launched just five months ago, the Turnip app already has over 2,50,000 users. Turnip was founded in April 2020 by Pooja Dubey and Aditya Sharma and has since become a 12-member team of individuals and gaming enthusiasts from new-age companies like Google, Spotify, Flipkart, Cure Fit, Razorpay, Rivigo, Paytm and Swiggy.

The mobile gaming market has over 600 million gamers who spend over an hour on their device each day, higher than the average of 45 minutes that is spent on OTT platforms like Netflix. Vaas Bhaskar of Elevation Capital, which was formerly Saif Partners, said "game streaming has moved from being a niche sub-culture to the mainstream in the country. Six of the 10 top YouTube live-streamers of 2020 were Indians. Creators like Total Gaming (19.1 million), Dynamo Gaming (9.1 million), Carry Minati (8.3 million), MortaL (6.3 million), and Scout (3.3 million) have all become household names. Additionally, casual gaming creators such as Live Insaan (5 million), Mythpat (6.3 million), and Tanmay Bhat (2.8 million) have successfully introduced non-gaming audiences to games.