Bangalore-based mobile games studio Mech Mocha has raised $5 million in series A funding from Shunwei Capital, Accel Partners and existing investor Blume Ventures.

The firm, which is focused solely on serving the Indian mobile games market, has so far generated four million downloads for its debut India release Chhota Bheem Himalayan Game.

Mech Mocha will be hoping to capitalise on the experience of both Western and Eastern markets offered by its new investors.

Accel Partners - which is based in the US but has a Bangalore office - has previously invested in Supercell and Rovio, while China's Shunwei Capital was founded by the head of smartphone giant Xiaomi.

To learn more about just how significant this investment is for Mech Mocha and its overall vision, PocketGamer.biz reached out to CEO and co-founder Arpita Kapoor.

PocketGamer.biz: How do you reflect on 2017 so far for Mech Mocha and the Indian mobile games market as a whole? What do you hope to have achieved by the end of the year?

Arpita Kapoor: We are very hopeful to see millions of Indians playing our games and bringing great global games to India through our publishing arm.

We are very, very selective with publishing partners as we want to focus on only a few titles for the next year.

How encouraging is this $5 million investment from Accel Partners andShunwei Capital?

We began with a simple vision: We are “Making India Play”.

It is very exciting to see that investors too are getting aligned to our vision. Now that we have two of the most experienced partners from the industry, we naturally are very excited.

How did the relationship between Mech Mocha and Accel Partners begin?

The Accel team sits in Bangalore and they have always been keen on gaming.

We knew Anand and Prayank for more than half a year and when we set out to raise our Series A, they were the first we reached out to.

Given their experience globally in the gaming space with Supercell and Rovio, they were the perfect partners.

Do you think Indian games studios are seeing more attention than ever from investors?

Yes, there is an increasing trend of investments in Indian gaming studios.

A multitude of factors and their combinations are responsible, such as: increased mobile hardware capability and penetration, lesser friction in payments, increased spending power of consumers and availability of localised content.

What will the investment go towards?

There are two core areas where we will invest.

We are building an integrated platform with capabilities in behavioural analytics, multiplayer, live ops and monetisation.

We will be launching new mobile gaming titles across the casual and midcore gaming categories, targeted at the Indian audience

How big is Mech Mocha currently, and do you plan to grow more?

We are a team of 30 right now. We are actively hiring across tech, product, game design and business roles.

However, we will remain lean as much as possible.

What projects are you currently working on? Are you targeting the Indian market only?

Absolutely yes, we are targeting Indian market only.

We have exciting new updates lined up for Chhota Bheem Himalayan Game. Apart from that, we are working on two new games which you will soon see on the app stores.