Paytm Set to Invest Rs. 5 Crore in Rooter Sports Technologies

According to reports at LiveMint, Patym First Games’ parent company One97 Communications is to invest Rs. 5 crore (approx. $655,000) in Rooter Sports Technologies as part of the latter's pre-Series A investment round.

Piyush and Dipesh Agarwal founded Rooter Sports Technologies in 2016. It is a sports social community platform where fans can access curated content in their preferred language.

Gaming fans can also live stream their play, share gaming videos and connect with other gamers. According to its website, Rooter currently boasts nearly five million fans who spend on average nearly 24 minutes on the platform daily.

Rooter and Paytm did not respond to email queries. But one unnamed analyst quoted by LiveMint said: “This is a strategic investment clearly. Content and gaming go hand in hand. Paytm FirstGames has a fantasy cricket gaming strategy and a lot of users do research on players and typically these individuals go to forums like Cricbuzz or other forums.

“But maybe with this strategic investment Paytm Games and Rooter can look at an integration, where users can play games and get information, and connect to a community of sports fans on a single platform”.

A second person added that Rooter will act as an acquisition channel for Patym, with users consuming content about players and teams before playing fantasy cricket through Paytm.

Paytm now has over 30 million registered users, and has seen around 75,000 new sign-ups daily since the lockdown to curb coronavirus started in India at the end of March.

The firm has been busy recently penning a deal with Supercell, and partnerships with Garena and the Esports Players League (ESPL)