PlayVerse, a technology-enabled entertainment firm, has raised $1.5 million in a funding round led by Akatsuki Inc., a Japanese gaming company.
In India, PlayVerse sells content, toys, games, and technology. PlayVerse will now attempt to maximise the monetisation potential of popular Japanese IPs and brands in India in order to increase cross-border cooperation between India and Japan.
“Thanks to the advent of blockchain technology and the scalability offered by promising L2 protocols, we have some moonshot ideas of IP monetisation that we are exploring,” said Jaineel Aga, founder, PlayVerse. “At the moment, we are focused on customer discovery and hypothesis testing to assess product-market fit.”
PlayVerse will create a direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand centred on an interconnected universe of content and “play.” With a 360-degree approach to content and goods, it attempts to harness the full potential of an IP.
This stuff would comprise both physical items like toys and digital assets like avatars, emoticons, and skins, which would pique users’ attention.
PlayVerse will also be concentrating its efforts on assisting content owners in maximising the monetisation potential of their IPs.
Aga, a serial entrepreneur, recently sold his first company, Planet Superheroes, to Nodwin Gaming, an esports firm and a Nazara Technologies affiliate.
A FICCI-EY report estimated that by 2025, 50% of the total time spent on OTT platforms will be to consume regional content and PlayVerse will also be aiming at localising global content into regional Indian languages to be inclusive and accessible to the diverse vernacular Indian audience.
The Indian toy market was worth $1.35 billion in 2021, while the Indian gaming sector is predicted to be worth $3.9 billion by 2025, with over 400 million online gamers.