Indian gaming venture capital firm Lumikai has announced a new game fund valued at $50m.

Lumikai’s latest fund will be the second so far, and investors include Krafton, Supercell and TakeTwo Interactive boss Ben Feder, with the fund focused on investing into early-stage game makers. According to information provided to outlets including Reuters, Lumikai is already in advanced talks to complete at least three deals with as-yet-unnamed parties. GamesIndustry.biz reports that the fund will concentrate on five key areas.

• Gaming content, original IP and digital media
• User-generated content platforms and creator economy
• Tools, technology and infrastructure
• Companies that use "systems of play" and applied game mechanics in other areas
• Frontier bets such as mixed reality, generative AI and edge computing

Invest in India

The Indian gaming market has been a hot topic in the game industry for years now, particularly mobile. With India forecast to overtake China in terms of number of players, but low revenue in comparison, discussion about how to make the release of titles and development of games profitable and attractive to investors has been at the fore.

Lumikai has been particularly active in the past, including funding a variety of Indian startups such as CloudFeather Games. But judging by past comments it’ll be mobile where the focus lies in the future. In November 2022, general partner at Lumikai, Justin Shriram Keeling commented on what made the Indian market unique from an investor’s point of view.

“The biggest difference is that India is a mobile-first market,” he said. “India didn’t see the evolution of gaming from 2D to 3D, to consoles and PC, and then to mobile like Japan or China. Four years ago, an Indian telco called Jio launched basically free 4G data to hundreds of millions of people. It was a supernova moment for India’s entire digital economy, including games.”

“Today we have over 800 million smartphone users in India, and half a billion of them play games. It’s an insanely deep market, but most of it is on mobile.”

Given the recent news about the predicted rise of the Indian gaming market to a record high of $8.6bn by a joint report featuring clients of AppTweak and AppsFlyer, it seems a given that Lumikai will help turbocharge the growth of local mobile startups in India.