A strategic fundraising round headed by Baring Capital secured $1.8 million for the cross-platform cloud gaming platform OnePlay. Inflection Point Ventures and several angel investors, including Kunal Shah of CRED, Jitendra Gupta, CEO of Jupiter, Suraj Nalin of PlaySimple Games, and Amit Shrivastav, CFO of Gupshup, participated in the round as well.
OnePlay is a decentralized and open-source cloud platform that enables users to stream games. It was founded in 2019 by Harshit Jain and Abhik Saha. Users can play games “without gaming gear or the need for expensive hardware” thanks to the platform.
The company will use some of the funding to expand hardware research and development (R&D) and improve video encoding and decoding technology, co-founder and CEO Harshit Jain told Inc42.
The company also plans to use the funds to expand its staff and broaden its product line. Jain explained that the business would expand its workforce by hiring senior and mid-level personnel in the upcoming months. The startup has been gradually releasing its product to customers and businesses while still in the beta stage.
According to Jain, the business is concentrating on a two-tier strategy – B2B and B2C – to increase its revenues before its official launch. The startup intends to employ a B2C business model to recruit GPU owners prepared to rent out their systems. OnePlay would then deploy these systems to expedite system traffic and make them available to users seeking to rent such servers.
In a statement to Inc42, Jain said, “On the B2B side, we are in talks with telcos across the globe. We will try to bundle our services with their subscriptions, just like how Netflix is doing as part of content, and then we will be their gaming partner for them, and they can onboard the people for us. For 5G, the biggest use case is gaming, and we are moving forward with the approach as to how we can utilize that in our favor.”
According to the startup, there are 24,000 people on its waiting list, and the company is steadily expanding the reach of its services. Regarding numerous products, it contends with industry juggernauts like Amazon Luna and NVIDIA GeForce Now while competing with regional competitors, including JioGamesCloud, The Gaming Project, and Ant Play.