Former Zynga, WalmartLabs employees land $4m to push games worldwide

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Siddharth Jain’s favorite part of building games is how holistic the process is, he tells Tech in Asia. That doesn’t just mean collaborating with different teams, like artists, designers, and product developers – that means bringing aspects of the real world into games to make them relevant.

He takes me back to yesteryear, when he was working on Zynga game Vampire Wars and the world was in the thick of its vampire obsession. He asks me if I remember True Blood (as if I could forget that dark and strange period of my life).

“Most of these games have a TV series or movie parallel,” he explains. There are two sides of gaming – the data/analytics of the user base and “all the TV and movie serials to watch.” He loves making both sides meet.

PlaySimple’s team. Photo credit: PlaySimple.

Today, he’s been able to make his passion meet money – he’s co-founded mobile social gaming company PlaySimple, which today announces it has raised US$4 million from Saif Partners and IDG Ventures.

The company plans to use the investment to expand its team and to continue producing games with an international audience in mind. Saif Partners previously participated in Chinese mobile game developer Linekong’s series C round.

IDG Ventures previously invested in the startup through one of its seed funding programs. It has also backed Vietnam-based gaming company Punch, which has since been acquired, as well as VNG.

PlaySimple offers trivia, word, and puzzle games. Siddharth, along with fellow ex-Zynga employees Preeti Reddy and Suraj Nalin, as well as former Walmart Labs engineer Siddhanth Jain, founded the startup in 2014. Siddharth formerly headed the product department for Zynga’s Mafia Wars and Bubble Safari.

The business’ 22-person team works out of Bangalore. Previously, the company participated in the Google Launchpad Accelerator.

Playing around the world

The majority of PlaySimple’s audience is over the age of 30, Siddharth tells Tech in Asia. It has two released games, emoji word guessing game GuessUp and word puzzle activity WordTrek. Siddharth, who heads up growth and marketing at the startup, did not disclose the number of active users.

PlaySimple has two more games currently in development.