Gaming is the ongoing ‘it’ thing, and the city has its share of gaming development companies that are doing good. One such company Atirath has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Kalaari Capital. The Hyderabad company develops games in the casual and strategy genre. Their games are special, thanks to the sub-continental culture that they incorporate that have a global appeal. The funds will be used for team expansion and to develop the economic model of the game metaverse.

Incidentally, India is among the top five mobile gaming markets in the world. High internet penetration rate, mobile-first phenomena, and low cost of internet connectivity are three key factors in driving this growth. As of today, mobile gaming is a $2.2 billion market in India and is expected to reach $7 billion by 2025, growing at an astounding CAGR of 40 percent. According to reports, an average Indian spends over 8.5 hours of gaming content per week.

Atirath was founded in mid-2020 by Shiva Bayyapunedi and Ramachandra Raju, who worked together at Apalya Technologies that Shiva founded and was later acquired. The duo has strong tech and business operations background, and their vision is to create a game metaverse with geographic, economic, and social experience in strategy game connecting players, content creators, and game publishers.

According to Shiva, co-founder of Atirath, business models like play to earn, play to collect with technology innovation in blockchain-based solutions in NFT/FT will fuel phenomenal growth. He points out that players are no longer passive, and new platforms will be enabling them to contribute and monetize the success of games. He further reveals that their firm is building a game metaverse in the strategy genre with an Indian mythology theme with unique gameplay features.

Vamshi Reddy of Kalaari Capital explains further, “We will see new forms of monetization layers coming up, especially with the onset of Play2Earn and amalgamation of NFTs and Crypto in gaming. Mythological games like God of War and Assassin’s Creed have worked out well across the world, selling over 200 million copies.”Reddy is confident that Indian mythology is an untapped opportunity and offers a high possibility of hit global IP being built out of here. “This, aligned with NFT gameplay, is a huge opportunity to create an immersive experience,” shares Reddy.