Turnip raises $12.5 million in Series A co-led by Greenoaks and Elevation Capital

Mobile-first gaming community platform Turnip has raised $12.5 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Greenoaks and Elevation Capital. This round also had participation from SEA Capital, Vibe Capital, and leading founders and angels, including Andrew Chen (Partner, a16z), Harshil and Shashank (Razorpay), Akshay Kothari (Notion), Geige Vandentop (Streamyard), Vidit and Sanjeev (Meesho), Gaurav an Roman (Unacademy), Lalit, Ishan and Harsh (Groww), Kalyan (Flipkart), and Sujeet (Udaan). Elevation Capital previously led the seed round of $1.6 million in the Bengaluru-based startup last year, with participation from Better Capital.

Modern gaming is a fundamentally social experience, Neil Shah, partner, Greenoaks, said. “Today’s streamers and other creators want to cultivate deep, personalized, and persistent relationships with their fans, with a richness that’s impossible to achieve on Twitch or YouTube alone. Turnip is building a platform that transforms passive viewers into an actively engaged community, delighting fans while enabling new options for creators, from subscriptions, to events, to sponsorships, and more. By nailing the mobile experience, we believe Turnip has democratised access for users across the world, letting anyone be a creator or a fan, no matter their device or hardware,” he added.

Turnip company was founded in April 2020 by Pooja Dubey and Aditya Sharma. Turnip aims to reimagine the future of gaming interaction by helping creators build communities that turn game streaming into a highly interactive, social, and engaging activity. The platform allows creators to form clubs, where they can stream or record their games for fans, talk on audio/video, text each other, run esports tournaments, and host masterclasses. The platform supports a diversity of creators, including live streamers, montage creators, esports organizations, college clubs, and groups of friends. Turnip also allows its users to stream and monetise their interactive experiences on existing platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch.

The company claims to have witnessed growth in the past year, growing its user base from 250,000 users in November 2020 to more than five million users in 2021 — over 60% of this growth has been organic. True to its mission, Turnip has made game streaming a deeply interactive and engaging experience with users collectively spending more than a billion minutes on the platform in 2021.

Though Turnip began with India, it is quickly becoming a truly global consumer product. Already, 45% of the company’s 5 million users are from outside of India, spanning geographies including Southeast Asia, Latin America, Middle East and North Africa, the US, and Europe. By 2025, the world is projected to have more than 2 billion gamers and Team Turnip is uniquely positioned to disrupt this space by helping create communities that strengthen the relationship between gaming creators and their fans.

“Our goal is to build from India for the two billion gamers spread across the world. Gamers have been early adopters of technologies and this has created some of the most innovative and immersive consumer products globally — Discord, Streamlabs, Unity, Twitch, Axie Infinity, etc. We want to continue on this same legacy and become the global default home for mobile gaming communities,” Pooja Dubey and Aditya Sharma said in a joint statement.

Given its global ambitions, the company will use the fresh funds to scale its presence across geographies as it aims to become the top gaming community platform in India, SEA, and LATAM by the end of 2022. It will also continue to strengthen its talented team and onboard tech, design, and growth leaders worldwide.

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