Mentioned in this article
- India-based Rheo is an online esports streaming and community platform.
- Rheo has raised $2M USD in seed funding via prominent institutional and angel investors.
- The company’s livestream app is currently available for Android users and is game agnostic.
Rheo, an esports and gaming livestream platform, has raised $2M in seed funding from prominent investors including Sequoia Capital India’s rapid scale-up program Surge, Lightspeed Ventures, and other prominent angel investors.
The company founded by Prakash Kumar and Saksham Keshri has launched a gaming and esports livestream app that is currently available on Android devices. The platform is game agnostic and currently allows for a variety of titles such as PUBG Mobile, Garena Free Fire, Call of Duty: Mobile and more to be livestreamed. Within four months of launch, Rheo claims to have attracted over 5,000 streamers who generate more than 900 hours of live content every day in five regional languages. Rheo allows users to earn in-app currency called Rheo Coins through various activities. It also hosts its own invite-only tournaments.
“Gaming is the new primetime – people are spending over 60 mins daily, between 6 pm to 12 am. India is no longer just a casual gaming market – even mobile mid-core titles like PUBG have seen a meteoric rise from 6Mn to 60Mn+ MAUs over just a few months. Watching other people play is the new type of sit back entertainment” said Vaibhav Agrawal, Partner at Lightspeed India.
The company’s list of prominent angel investors include Gaurav Munjal, Hemesh Singh, Roman Saini, Dinesh Godara – co-founders, Unacademy; Mahesh Narayanan; former India manager at LinkedIn, former India head at Google Mobile and former managing director at Saavn; Anushray Gupta, chief technology officer at Cuemath; Prashant Malik, advisor at Zomato and inventor of Cassandra at Facebook; Ranjit Radhakrishnan, chief product officer at BYJU’s; and Phanindra Sama RedBus founder.
Kumar and Keshri are second-time entrepreneurs who previously co-founded Mojo Times, a video news platform for independent journalists.
Nishant Patel is the co-founder of AFK Gaming.
