Indian digital entertainment company, Rusk Media, aimed at GenZ audiences, has raised over $9.5 million in Series A funding round. The funding round is led by DAOL Investment and Audacity Ventures along with the existing investors InfoEdge Ventures, Mistry Ventures and Survam Partners.
Pexels
"With the behavioral shift of the digital native audiences, entertainment has transformed across 30-seconds snackable social videos, OTT shows, casual and AAA Gaming. Our future plans are already two-fold, firstly scaling our content with OTT partners via our IPs. Secondly, building a UGC-led social gaming platform that will enable game developers to create games and publish them on our platform," said Mayank Yadav, CEO, Rusk Media.
Rusk Media has raised a total of $12 million in the last three years and counts Nazara Games and NODWIN gaming as their investors among others. The company is known through its content and IPs on social channels Alright and Playground with over 500 million monthly views and their shows on OTT platforms, claimed by the company in a statement.
"We have confidence in Rusk's competitiveness in IP creation across fiction, non-fiction and e-sports entertainment. As investors from Korea, we have seen the immense potential of locally generated premium content and scalability of strong IPs," said Chihoon Hyun, partner at DAOL Investment.
"Rusk has quickly grown to being the leader in capturing GenZ culture through content. Rusk understands its consumer intimately and its latest social gaming initiative will benefit the whole web3 and gaming ecosystem by bringing in the one thing that the web3 community needs the most, relevant users," said Kabir Kochhar, managing partner, Audacity Venture Capital.
Rusk Media with NODWIN gaming, recently launched gaming entertainment, IP playground built with Indian gaming entertainers including CarryMinati, Triggered Insaan, ScoutOP and Mortal. It has garnered over 200 million views. The IP is slated to go global for the upcoming edition in December 2022 to January 2023, as per company statement.