Inside Kreo’s mission to build India’s own gaming electronics brand
Founded by Ishan Sukul and Himanshu Gupta, Bengaluru-based Kreo is blending affordability and quality as it gears up to launch its first made-in-India gaming monitors.
Ishan Sukul, a gaming nerd, spent his early years tinkering with gaming products on his home PC, which gave him an understanding of gaming technology.
“Those exact same products still run the market. The global brands are slightly cheaper now and there are value-oriented products that are not great in quality,” he says.
Driven by the idea of making quality gaming products that are affordable, Sukul co-founded gaming consumer electronics brand Kreo in 2022 along with Himanshu Gupta (COO).
The Bengaluru-based D2C brand has a 23-member team with a warehouse in the city. In two years, the startup has served more than five lakh customers, with 14% repeat customer base.
A consumer electronics brand for Indian gamers
While India accounts for only 3.6% of the global gaming PC market, Sukul believes the country’s large population more than makes up for it.
“We are still dealing with around 40 million people. The market is progressing though we are still not as mature as the US market,” Sukul, the CEO, tells YourStory, adding that mobile gamers usually cross over to PC gaming with time.
While most of Kreo’s products are manufactured outside the country, it released its first range of indigenously produced gaming monitors on September 26.
“We have to import many components as they are not yet being manufactured in India. But we plan to introduce some components with our industrial designs in the next 15 months,” he shares.
Kreo’s in-house monitors are manufactured in North India, while some of its international manufacturers are located in Malaysia, Vietnam, and China.
Kreo's line of products. Source: Kreo
The consumer electronics brand is looking beyond the gaming industry. In fact, Sukul says about 40% of the customers are non-gamers and general techies.
“The difference between a gaming PC and a regular PC is that the former has a much faster response time. A mechanical keyboard (most gaming keyboards) is more comfortable than a membrane keyboard (non-gaming keyboard). So, these performance-driven keyboards can be useful to programmers as well,” says Sukul.
The D2C brand claims to be selling over 16,000 units per month, with its products ranging from the Harpy gaming mouse (Rs 699) and the Cirrus gaming chair (Rs 18,999). Its highest-selling product is the Kreo Swarm gaming keyboard (the base model is priced at Rs 5,299).
A jack of all trades
The startup recently launched Kreo Kontrol, a web-based hub where people can configure their Kreo products online.
“You will see legacy companies use offline software to configure their products. Kontrol is the same but online. We plan to incorporate all our legacy and new products on it so a user can change the settings there seamlessly,” Sukul says.
Kreo shared a report titled ‘How India Games’ in 2025. The CEO was surprised by the number of people who participated in the survey in its maiden year.
“We were expecting about 1,000 people, but as much as 6,000 people ended up participating in the survey,” he says.
The gaming peripherals market in India is around $500 million and is expected to grow to $800 million by 2033. Sukal hopes that Kreo will be a dominant player in that market. He says Kreo is planning to get 10 lakh more customers in the next 12 months.
“We are going to launch new categories—going beyond the gamer persona. We want to get about 20% of the market share of the 3-crore user base, which means we will have about 60 lakh customers,” he says.
Kreo also plans to organise events. “We are planning a series of proprietary offline and online events for 2025, aimed at creators, gamers, and early adopters of tech. We are aiming to do one such event per quarter,” he shares.
Funding
Kreo raised a seed round of Rs 6.5 crore led by Sauce.VC in 2023, taking the total amount raised to Rs 14 crore. The CEO says that the consumer electronics brand breaks even on most months and made a profit in a couple of months last year.
“We spend most of the money in building our IP and the rest in marketing and branding. We have generated a total of Rs 50 crore in revenue and are targeting Rs 100 crore by the end of this year,” he says.
Once that is achieved, Kreo aims to hit Rs 15 crore in monthly revenue and finally close in on Rs 200 crore in annual revenue, he adds.
Yash Dholakia, Director of Sauce.VC, says, they were excited about the ‘rapid expansion’ of the creator and gaming space in India.
“Kreo has demonstrated exceptional acumen in understanding this consumer segment and translating it into affordable yet innovative and unique products,” Dholakia says.
Competing with global companies like US-based Razer Inc and Logitech G, Kreo separates itself with its affordability and product novelty.
“People usually value performance over everything, and we deliver that with a good design at a decent value. People who are looking to buy a more global brand, but aren't able to afford it, usually come to us and buy.”
The CEO adds that Kreo’s larger goal is to make its products more accessible to every type of user, to “power the next set of our youth, enabling them to game, code, educate, design, and create better”.