Quick take:
- Square Peg, Beenext, Hashed, Tiger Global and Better Capital invested in the round.
- The round also saw participation from angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan, Paul Veradittakit, Binny Bansal and others.
- Funds will be used to develop Lysto’s platform, scale its business and build tools for on-chain credentials.
Lysto, an India-based Web3 startup that issues digital credentials on-chain for gamers, today announced that it has raised $12 million in a pre-Series A funding round from venture firms including Square Peg, Beenext, Hashed, Tiger Global and Better Capital.
The round also saw participation from angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan (ex-CTO, Coinbase), Paul Veradittakit (partner, Pantera Capital), Binny Bansal (founder, Flipkart) and Bobby Ong & TM Lee, (co-founders, CoinGecko).
Funds will be used to develop Lysto’s platform, scale its business development and build tools for issuing on-chain credentials. The platform aims to unify Web3 gamer persona across games, platforms and chains.
Founded last year by Sadiq Ahamed, Lysto builds APIs, NFTs and allied tools and primarily issues digital credentials on-chain to online gamers after they win a tournament or game. The credentials can then be published on the gamers’ social media profiles in the form of NFTs.
The startup recently launched “Proof of Play Protocol” (PoPP) which offers standardised gamer credentials and reputation across the industry. PoPP can be issued by games, tournaments or even auto-generated by gamers as trophies, game and social badges and game-tester tokens.
“Through PoPP and Passport, Lysto is enabling the gaming ecosystem to standardise gamer reputation. We envision a world where on-chain attestations across games and tournaments can form the basic building block of gamers’ profiles,” said Sadiq Ahamed, founder and CEO of Lysto.
In November last year, Lysto raised $3 million in seed funding from Beenext, and Better Capital – which continued their investments in the company in the latest funding round – as well as Cloud Capital. Including this round of funding, the startup has raised a total of $15 million to date.
“We are excited by the interplay of gaming and crypto, especially when combined with this team’s unique credentials and their passion to bring crypto to the masses,” said Tushar Roy, Partner, Square Peg, an Australia-headquartered company that invests in emerging technology companies.
Tak Lee, managing partner at Hashed Emergent, said that the venture capital firm’s investment in Lysto is to help the startup scale across gaming and the Web3 ecosystem. Hashed Emergent is a Seoul and Silicon Valley-based VC firm under the global early-stage venture fund Hashed, focusing on blockchain and founders from emerging markets, particularly India.
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