Gaming platform Lysto raises $12M pre-Series A

Lysto, a gaming platform, announced today that it has raised over $12 million in a pre-Series A funding from large institutional and gaming & crypto investors, such as Square Peg, Beenext, Hashed, Tiger Global and Better Capital, also joined the round.

Leading 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) also participated.

The funding round comes when the company doubles down on the global gaming communities by building tools to enable verified on-chain digital credentials from issuer to gamer.

The round comes on the heels of the $3 million seed capital raised by the company in November 2021 from marquee investors and angels. Since then, Lysto has grown to a team of 25 individuals with a shared vision of enabling gamers to build and showcase their credentials across games.

Additionally, Lysto has announced ‘Proof of Play Protocol (PoPP)’, which aims to standardise gamer credentials and reputation across the industry. Depending on the use case, these can be issued by games, tournaments or even auto-generated by gamers as trophies, game, and social badges, game-tester tokens, etc.

The PoPPs can also be shared with gamers via AirDrops, APIs and even emails. Gamers can showcase their PoPPs via a ‘Passport’, which acts like their public profile.

“Through PoPP and Passport, Lysto enables the gaming ecosystem to standardise Gamer reputation. We envision a world where billions of such 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, Lysto.

“Having backed some of the best gaming companies in the world, we are excited about Lysto’s mission to get gamer reputation on-chain. We are partnering with Lysto to help them scale across gaming and the web3 ecosystem that we have been building over the years,” said Tak Lee, Managing Partner, Hashed Emergent.