Turnip raises $12.5 million for its mobile-first gaming community platform

techcrunch.com:

Turnip, an Indian startup that is building a mobile-first gaming community platform, has raised $12.5 million in a new financing round to deepen its footprint in India and dozens of other countries and dabble with web3 as it looks to broaden its product offerings.

Greenoaks and Elevation Capital co-led the one-and-a-half-year-old startup’s Series A round. SEA Capital, Vibe Capital and scores of entrepreneurs including Andrew Chen of Andreessen Horowitz, Sujeet Kumar of Udaan, Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar of Razorpay, Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini of Unacademy, Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain and Ishan Bansal of Groww and Akshay Kothari of Notion also participated in the round.

Several platforms such as Twitch and YouTube exist for gamers to help them distribute to an infinitely large user base. “But nobody is solving the deeper engagement and monetization,” said Pooja Dubey, founder of Turnip, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We have seen these challenges being addressed in other categories, but gaming right now has a whitespace.”

Turnip is attempting to solve this by allowing gamers to build a community on its app, where they can stream live gameplay from their mobile devices, engage with their fans and monetize.

Fans watch the gameplays within the app and can interact with the person playing the game in real-time through text chats, audio and video. Gamers can continue to stream on any platform and integrate the gameplay into Turnip to engage with their top fans. They can also host esports tournaments and master classes on the app to deeply engage with the audience.

The platform, which offers a wide-range of tools and integrations, is designed to extend support to low-specced devices as well as slower internet connections,