Flipkart Acquires Mobile Gaming Startup Mech Mocha

📖 Learning

Tanusha Verma

Nov 5, 2020 — 4 min read

E-commerce site Flipkart recently announced that it had acquired the intellectual property from mobile gaming startup Mech Mocha, in a bid to strengthen its gaming strategy.

Mech Mocha is a mobile gaming startup that owns the country's first live-social gaming platform known as 'Hello Play'. In addition to this, acquisition of the company’s IP, Mech Mocha’s gaming team would join Flipkart as Mech Mocha continues to focus on developing new and innovative formats to engage with users on its platform.

Flipkart will also take over 10 games that Mech Mocha has developed over the past five years, including Ludo, Carrom, Snakes and Ladders, and Cricket.

From having @Flipkart as our seed investor along with Blume to now joining hands to build entertainment at scale for India - it's been a quite a full circle. Feeling immense gratitude towards all @MechMocha team members, investors, advisors and partners. https://t.co/77bhfReGKN
— Arpita Kapoor (@Arpita_Kapoor) November 3, 2020

“With vocal for local being the focus for digital apps across the nation, this strategic backing of Flipkart provides us an opportunity to be part of a larger ecosystem that helps us create unique social gaming experiences for Indian users. We look forward to being a part of the Flipkart ecosystem and leveraging the Flipkart Cloud Platform, Super Coins, Reward Store and Flipkart Ads platform to strengthen the platform for our users,” said CEO Arpita Kapoor.

This acquisition comes at a time when social mobile gaming is witnessing massive growth and adoption in India. In India, 50% of smartphone users play mobile games, with the average time spent exceeding an hour daily, according to a report by Kantar.

The gaming platform is also aiming to expand this growth especially in the absence of widely popular PUBG Mobile. Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds or PUBG Mobile and PUBG Mobile Lite were recently banned by the Indian government due to security concerns, and they finally stopped working in the country last week.

“At Flipkart, we are focused on providing consumers with an opportunity to access great products and content while giving them an engaging experience. We see many first-time e-commerce users come online through formats such as video and games, as they build familiarity with the medium. Our observations of Flipkart GameZone, reflect this trend as we see a strong correlation between casual gamers becoming early shoppers on Flipkart for their digital journey," Prakash Sikaria, Vice-President, Flipkart, said in a statement.

Mech Mocha is currently available in seven Indian local languages and has over 10 games including popular Indian multiplayer games such as Ludo, Carrom, Snakes & Ladder, and Cricket.

Mech Mocha, also based in Bengaluru like Flipkart, was founded in 2014 by IIT Gwalior Graduates Arpita Kapoor and Mohit Rangaraju and is supported by top-tier venture funds including Accel Partners, Blume Ventures and Shunwei Capital. Flipkart is also an early investor, having participated in the startup’s $1 million seed round in 2015.