Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, have made an investment in an offline games start-up MadRat Games. The other investors who have participated in the funding round of about $1 million (about Rs 6.2 crore) include the founders of IT outsourcing firm GlobalLogic – Rajul Garg, Sanjay Singh, Manoj Agarwala and Tarun Upadhyay. MadRat, founded in 2010, started out by launching a Hindi word game Aksharit.
Since then, the company started by IIT graduates Rajat Dhariwal, Manuj Dhariwal and Madhumita Halder has launched over 70 board games, puzzles and toys. Their area of expertise is in distribution of its products primarily through offline stores, but there are also plans to use the funds for branding, marketing and expansion. Its existing investors Blume Ventures and First Light Ventures did not participate in this round. When the company completed a year of distributing the games through retail stores earlier this year, the founders decided to take stock of how the business is doing.
The company had a turnover of Rs 3 crore last fiscal. The market for the Indian toy industry is expected to expand to Rs 13,000 crore in 2015, according to a report by industry body Assocham. MadRat did a market survey and realised that while parents knew their games, they did not know the brand. Thus, this
Earlier, the company had a product-centric approach, with a unique design for each of its games, but now it has come up with a brand new look for its games and also rethought its distribution strategy that it took to potential investors.
MadRat, which was selling through 2,000 stores, will now focus on retailing through 50 stores. The company plans to launch its own experience store in Bangalore soon and use customer data from the retail stores for future marketing and product design.