Canada’s Play It Interactive closes $1.1m funding round, moves in on India

Play It Interactive, the Canadian mobile content platform that enables feature phone and Android users to take part in cloud-based social gaming, has announced the opening of an Indian head office in Mumbai following the closing of its $1.1 million funding round. There, it plans to deploy its mobile fan engagement offerings to media companies and sports brands.

Play It Interactive is also planning on recruiting local talent to both localize its products and manage partnerships. Ray Newal, international head of Play It Interactive and also the founder of bandwidth-efficient mobile streaming platform Jigsee, shared that Play It’s first engagement with the Indian market, a fantasy football app that coincided with the FIFA World Cup, saw over 500,000 users with an average user session running over 14 minutes.

“These early indications point to tremendous engagement potential of our platform in the Indian market,” Newal said. He added that the product was designed to engage a wide audience of sports fans in India by providing immersive experiences that are accessible to mobile subscribers at the lowest price point possible.

(See: What Nintendo’s new consoles for emerging markets need to do to really succeed)

The Indian gaming market is evolving rapidly. According to last year’s FICCI-KPMG Indian Media and Entertainment Industry report, the gaming industry in India is growing at 22 percent rate, with Playstation leading the market.

As if proof of that, many new Indian gaming companies have surfaced in the last decade. Several, like Games2win and Bash Gaming, have made their marks globally as well. But piracy, limited bandwidth, high costs, and the technical challenges involved with developing and porting gaming content, and non-availability of payment systems as an alternative to credit cards, are some of the big challenges for the gaming industry in India.

It looks like Play It Interactive has just the right product to combat the issues we just named. Now the question is, will it be able to muster the clout?

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