Flipkart & Snapdeal in rat race! Both invest about Rs 1.8 crore in MadRat Games

e-Commerce companies Flipkart and Snapdeal have invested around Rs 1.8 crore and funded the designer of board games MadRat for children. Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal of Flipkart made their investment in November last year while Snapdeal's Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal did that recently.

"They (the other investors) started smiling when I told them both Snapdeal and Flipkart are participating. 'How did you manage that?' was their first question," MadRat Games Pvt Ltd CEO Rajat Dhariwal told the Economic Times.

Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal didn't have any issues over their competitors investing in the firm, said Dhariwal, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay and Carnegie Mellon University.

Participants in the funding round of about $1 million (about Rs 6.2 crore) included the founders of IT outsourcing firm GlobalLogic - Rajul Garg, Sanjay Singh, Manoj Agarwala and Tarun Upadhyay. Vikas Choudhury, promoter of Pivot Ventures, investment banker Sandeep Bordia and equity crowd funding site Globevestor have also put money into the company.

"Innovation is at the heart of MadRat Games," said Binny Bansal, the single largest investor in the round. The company has Ravi Vora, CEO of the strategic brands group at Flipkart, on its board.

Snapdeal declined to comment on the personal investments of the founders.

According to Dhariwal, investors see potential in MadRat. "Everyone is building brands in-house. In the children category, I think the two companies see us as a top brand," he said.

The company, which will launch a crowd funding campaign on Kickstarter in August as part of efforts to go global, is looking to compete with the likes of global giants Hasbro and Mattel.


Before setting up MadRat in 2010, Dhariwal taught kids for four years at Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh along with co-founder Madhumita Halder. Their experience showed them that children learn best when lessons are not forced down their throats.

For instance, a jigsaw puzzle is usually discarded after being solved a few times. MadRat has sought to build on this, adding card games based on the pictures in the jigsaw or getting players to hunt for tiny characters hidden in the puzzle with a magnifying glass.

Rajul Garg said: "What we found promising in MadRat was the team's sharp focus on becoming 'the' brand known for providing wholesome entertainment for kids."

The games are priced between Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 and are available in 400 stores in 10 cities — and on Flipkart and Snapdeal. The company said it has sold 60,000 units of the five games it launched in January.

"Learning should be like osmosis. It should happen without them (kids) knowing about it," said Dhariwal. The market is large, with the Indian toy industry expected to expand to Rs 13,000 crore in 2015 from Rs 8,000 crore in 2013, according to a report by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM).

(Image: Indiatimes)