Gaming platform Lysto raises $12M in Pre-Series A funding

On a mission to bring a billion gamers and their credentials on-chain, Lysto, a Singapore and Bengaluru-based platform for gamers, announced that it has raised over $12 million in Pre-Series A funding.

The round saw participation from institutional as well as gaming and crypto investors, such as Square Peg, BEENEXT, Hashed, Tiger Global, and Better Capital. Leading angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan (ex-CTO, Coinbase), Paul Veradittakit (Partner, Pantera Capital), Binny Bansal (Founder, Flipkart) and Bobby Ong, and TM Lee, (Co-founders, CoinGecko), among others, were also a part of the investment round.

In a statement, the company said that the funding comes at a time when it is doubling down on global gaming communities by building tools to enable verified on-chain digital credentials from issuer to gamer.

“Having backed some of the best gaming companies in the world, we are excited about Lysto’s mission to get gamer reputation on-chain. We are partnering with Lysto to help them scale across gaming and the web3 ecosystem that we have been building over the years,” said Tak Lee, Managing Partner, Hashed Emergent.

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It last raised $3 million of seed capital in November from marquee investors and angels. Since then, Lysto claims to have grown to a team of 25 individuals with a shared vision of enabling gamers to build and showcase their credentials across games.

On the sidelines of the Korea Blockchain Week 2022, Lysto announced ‘Proof of Play Protocol (PoPP)’, which aims to standardise gamer credentials and reputation across the industry. Depending on the use case, these can be issued by games, tournaments, or even auto-generated by gamers as trophies, game and social badges, game-tester tokens, etc.

The PoPPs can also be shared with gamers via AirDrops, APIs and even emails. Gamers can showcase their PoPPs via a ‘Passport’, which acts like their public profile.

"Through PoPP and Passport, Lysto is enabling the gaming ecosystem to standardise Gamer reputation. We envision a world where billions of such on-chain attestations across Games and Tournaments can form the basic building block of Gamers’ profiles. Leveraging this, we are on a mission to build the world’s largest gaming community,” said Sadiq Ahamed, Founder and CEO, Lysto.

“We are excited by the interplay of gaming and crypto, especially when combined with this team's unique credentials and their passion to bring crypto to the masses. The team is early in the journey yet has built out great capabilities in space,” added Tushar Roy, Partner, Square Peg.