Ludo Superstar creator Blacklight concludes maiden funding round
Summary
Kratos Studios, the brainchild of former CEO of Nazara Technologies, Manish Agrawal, alongside Polygon Ventures and Dexter Ventures also participated in this funding round.BlackLight plans to use the funds to expand into new markets, hiring and invest in artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance player experience through personalisation. The global stage holds potential as billions of smartphone users is each a potential gamer," said Saraf.It claims to have over 200 million downloads across three titles and its flagship game Ludo SuperStar has been one of the most downloaded Ludo titles. "Anupam and Shruti have built Blacklight grounds up and we are looking forward to building an international gaming studio brand from India," said Rahul Gupta, managing partner at Udyat Ventures.Udyat Ventures is the family office of the of Harsh Gupta, managing director of Udyat Group. The firm, last year, had backed Pune-based IoT startup ThingsUp in its seed funding round.Dexter Capital was the exclusive financial adviser to the company on this transaction. "Without a single rupee of external capital, Shruti and Anupam have built Blacklight to be among the top 10 gaming publishers in India with a cumulative download of 200 mn+ and three of their games Ludo Superstar, Callbreak Superstar, and Carrom Superstar are among the top five ranked games in their respective categories," said Devendra Agrawal from Dexter Capital.I have seen closely the data-driven mindset and work ethics of Shruti and Anupam as they went about building a Blacklight Games fully bootstrapped and I believe with this round of funding they would scale to global markets, leveraging the solid foundation they have built thus far, said Manish Agarwal, co-founder, Kratos Studios.