Web3 platform Lysto bags $12 million in pre-Series A round

Web3 game platform Lysto has raised over $12 million in pre-Series A funding from investors like Tiger Global, Hashed Emergent, Beenext, Square Peg and Better Capital. Angel investors like former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, Pantera Capital partner Paul Veradittakit, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and CoinGecko co-founders Bobby Ong and TM Lee were also part of this financing round.

The Bengaluru-based start-up had raised a $3 million seed funding from Beenext, Better Capital and other angel investors in November 2021. "We envision a world where billions of on-chain attestations across games and tournaments can form the basic building block of gamers' profiles. Leveraging this, we are on a mission to build the world's largest gaming community," said Sadiq Ahamed, founder and CEO of Lysto.

"We are excited by the interplay of gaming and crypto, especially when combined with this team's unique credentials and their passion for bringing crypto to the masses," said Tushar Roy, Partner, Square Peg. The Australian venture capital firm's current assets under management stand at around $3 billion, and it is raising $550 million in new funding.

Tak Lee, managing partner of Hashed Emergent, added that the venture capital firm is investing in Lysto to help the start-up scale across gaming and the Web3 ecosystem that it has been building itself over the years. It had recently backed a community-led investing platform for cryptocurrencies, Crypso. 

Sadiq Ahamed founded Lysto to create and sell NFTs for the e-commerce, gaming, entertainment and animation industries. According to a company statement, its Proof of Play Protocol standardises gamer credentials and reputation and can be issued by games and tournaments. In a beta testing phase, it can also be auto-generated by gamers as trophies, game and social badges and game-tester tokens. 

While cryptocurrency prices have been seeing a steady decline leading to a massive sell-off in digital assets, Indian start-ups focusing on crypto and Web3 start-ups are still catching the fancy of investors. These companies have raised more than $1 billion in funding across 43 deals by June 2022. It is almost double the $536 million funding it received across 39 deals in 2021, according to Venture Intelligence's information.

Earlier this month, crypto investing app CoinSwitch launched the Web3 Discovery Fund to invest in and incubate early-stage start-ups building blockchain solutions for the landscape. With an initial corpus of $10 million, it will act as a launchpad for up to 100 start-ups in India.

Other deals include Web3 platform Polygon raised $450 million in a financing round from several investors. These included Tiger Global, SoftBank, Galaxy Digital, Republic Capital, Makers Fund, Alameda Research, Alan Howard, Dune Ventures, Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six, Steadview Capital, Unacademy, Elevation Capital, Animoca Brands, Spartan Fund, Dragonfly Capital, Variant Fund, Sino Global Capital and Kevin O'Leary. This will help the company expand its portfolio of Ethereum scaling solutions and attract a larger developer ecosystem. 

In April, cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX raised $136 million, while the treasury management platform Coinshift raised $15 million a month later. In June, blockchain technology start-up Zeeve raised $2.65 million in a funding round from Leo Capital and Blu Ventures. In the same month, Web3 payments start-up Nume Crypto raised $2 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital India.