WinZO co-founder reveals plans to grow gaming startup and create an ecosystem after $65M fundraise

New Delhi-based gaming and entertainment platform WinZO recently raised $65 million from Griffin Gaming Partners, and has plans to game on!

Paavan Nanada, Co-Founder, WinZO, says the company has grown 10X over the last 12 months and aims to grow at least 5X more by March 2022.

WinZO is a gaming platform that partners with third-party game developers and get their games on board. Users can go to the WinZO app and play popular global games in a multiplayer format; it also has a microtransaction aspect that allows people to get small monetary rewards.

Paavan says the team is “very excited” to close their recent financing and even more excited about the new partnerships they have forged. They aim to continue to improve the product for users, add more games to the platform, and partner with more game developers.

“We have always maintained that WinZO is here to create an ecosystem.”

According to Paavan, game developers are an important pillar for growth and WinZO aims to strengthen its relationship with them and provide products to help them build, distribute, and monetise their games on the platform.

The company also plans to create more products for micro-influencers or streams, to let them engage more with followers. WinZO presently offers 70+ games in 5+ formats, and plans to launch a lot more features. "The whole idea is to really diversify the product.”  

Growth and gaming

WinZO aims to become the go-to gaming app for the Indian audience. The company offers the product in 12 different languages and about 90 percent  of their users come from Tier II-V cities.

Paavan says at present there are 50 million registered users on the platform and “the goal is to reach 250 million users by the end of 2022”. He believes that their product is relevant to about 500 million people in India, and that they are planning to experiment with distribution and go aggressive on branding.

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The co-founder says growth has been “phenomenal” for the company, which profited from the fact that the sector did extremely well during the pandemic. He says WinZO is growing at a very healthy double-digit percentage – “roughly 10-15 percent on a month-on-month basis” - and aims to grow faster.

Listing on the stock market is an obvious aim, but the team believes WinZO is still at a very nascent stage as compared to Nazara Technologies. However, WinZO is open minded about opportunities.

“We dream to definitely ring the bell at either the Indian stock exchange or American stock exchange,” Paavan says.

Paavan concludes by saying that WinZO, as a business, is already profitable at a unit economics level from day zero. “We had always wanted to build a really healthy business and have successfully done it.”