Startup Deep Dive : Trinity Gaming — bootstrapped for five years before a Rs 24 crore sale to NODWIN

Trinity Gaming spent five years building one of India’s largest gaming-creator networks without raising a single rupee of venture capital, then sold the entire company in an afternoon. On 29 November 2024, Nazara Technologies’ esports arm NODWIN Gaming bought 100% of Trinity Gaming for ₹24 crore (~$2.5 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) — a mix of cash and a stock swap that made Trinity’s own founders shareholders in their acquirer.

That is the contradiction worth sitting with: a company that spent years teaching Indian gamers how to get paid for playing video games never itself took outside money until the day it stopped being independent. What it built in between — a roster that grew from a handful of streamers to more than 1,000 creators, and brand relationships with Samsung, Realme, iQOO and Krafton — is the story of how a gaming talent agency gets built in a market where almost nobody believed gaming was a career yet.

Quick facts

What they do

Trinity Gaming manages gaming and esports content creators — the people who stream and upload gameplay on YouTube and Instagram — and sells the audience those creators built to brands. It runs as a YouTube multi-channel network (MCN) and a Meta Certified Sales Partner (CSP), which in practice means it handles the parts of a creator’s business that a solo streamer usually cannot: copyright and monetisation management, PR, graphic and channel production support, and brokering paid brand deals. By the time of its 2024 acquisition, Trinity said it worked with more than 1,000 creators and had run campaigns for Samsung, Realme, iQOO and Krafton, the publisher of BGMI (Inc42, December 2024).

The origin

Trinity Gaming was founded in 2019 by Abhishek Aggarwal and Shivam Rao on a simple bet: that gaming could be a real career in India, not a hobby parents tolerated. In a 2021 interview, Aggarwal put it plainly: “We founded Trinity Gaming to make people look at esports as a viable career option” (Sportskeeda, 2021). At the time, India’s streaming scene was thin — a small number of creators were building audiences on YouTube with almost no professional support around contracts, brand outreach or channel growth. Trinity’s founding insight was that the gap wasn’t talent, it was infrastructure: creators needed someone to handle the business side so they could focus on content. The company built what it called a “Gaming Gurukul” — a structured onboarding and mentorship track covering gameplay improvement, graphic design support, social media strategy and PR (Sportskeeda, 2021).

The struggle years

The honest version of Trinity’s early years is less dramatic than a near-death story and more a story of running lean by necessity. Aggarwal has said that in the company’s first phase, staff worked without pay while the founders put their effort into people rather than hardware or software (Sportskeeda, 2021) — a bootstrapped posture the company held for its entire independent life. Trinity never announced an institutional seed or Series A round; no named venture investor appears anywhere in its public record before the 2024 acquisition. That is itself the struggle: scaling a talent-management business, where the core cost is people and the core asset walks out the door every evening, using internally generated cash rather than outside capital. The growth curve shows the strain and the payoff at once — from two founders and a skeleton crew in 2019 to a roster the company described as more than 200 creators by 2021 (Sportskeeda, 2021), and past 1,000 creators by the time NODWIN came calling in late 2024 (Inc42, December 2024).

The turning point

The defining event in Trinity’s history is the day it stopped being Trinity’s alone. On 29 November 2024, NODWIN Gaming — the esports and gaming-events company majority-backed by listed Nazara Technologies — acquired 100% of Trinity Gaming for ₹24 crore, structured as ₹4.8 crore in cash and a ₹19.2 crore stock swap, with Trinity’s founders becoming NODWIN shareholders and staying on to run the business (Inc42, December 2024; AFAQS, December 2024; Exchange4Media, December 2024). The timing was notable on both sides of the ledger:

• Two days before the Trinity deal, Nazara Technologies had closed a ₹855 crore fundraise, giving its group fresh capital for acquisitions (Inc42, December 2024).
• Trinity went into the deal with over 1,000 creators under management and zero prior institutional funding rounds — an unusually capital-light company to be acquired by a listed group’s subsidiary.
• NODWIN co-founder Akshat Rathee framed it as a capability acquisition: “This acquisition allows us to offer more holistic solutions to our partners, from content creation to marketing services” (Inc42, December 2024).
• The Trinity deal was one of several NODWIN had done in the same stretch, alongside buyouts of Ninja Global FZCO, Comic Con India and Freaks 4U Gaming (Inc42, December 2024) — Trinity was folded into a wider roll-up of gaming-adjacent businesses rather than acquired in isolation.

The money behind it

Trinity’s funding shape breaks the usual startup playbook. There was no seed round, no Series A, and no named angel or venture backer disclosed at any point before the 2024 sale — the only capital event on record is the acquisition itself.

• Total institutional capital raised before acquisition: none publicly disclosed.
• Acquisition consideration (November 2024): ₹24 crore total — ₹4.8 crore cash plus a ₹19.2 crore stock swap (Inc42, December 2024).
• Acquirer / new majority owner: NODWIN Gaming, in which Nazara Technologies held a 46.87% stake after a later restructuring that reclassified NODWIN from subsidiary to associate company (Inc42, 2025).
• What changed for the founders: Abhishek Aggarwal and Shivam Rao converted from sole owner-operators to NODWIN shareholders who continue to run Trinity day-to-day (Exchange4Media, December 2024).
• What changed for the business: access to NODWIN’s wider network of esports properties, brand relationships and events infrastructure, in place of the standalone brand deals Trinity had relied on until then.

How it makes money

Trinity’s revenue model is standard for a creator-economy agency, built around three linked activities rather than one product.

• MCN monetisation support: as a YouTube multi-channel network, Trinity assists partner creators with monetisation, copyright and channel management, typically earning a share of the ad revenue or a service fee in exchange — the exact take rate is not publicly disclosed.
• Meta Certified Sales Partner services: Trinity is positioned as a CSP for Meta, helping creators and brands run paid collaborations on Instagram and Facebook (Inc42, December 2024).
• Brand and agency activations: campaigns run for advertisers such as Samsung, Realme, iQOO and Krafton, where Trinity is paid directly by the brand to deploy its creator roster (Inc42, December 2024).

The part outsiders tend to get wrong is assuming an MCN’s money comes mainly from ad-revenue share. In practice, for an agency the size of Trinity, brand and agency deals — where a company pays a flat fee to reach a creator’s audience — are usually the higher-margin, more controllable line, because they don’t depend on a platform’s ad rates or algorithm. Ad-revenue-share income is real but volatile; it moves with each platform’s monetisation policy, which is also why Trinity’s pitch to creators was as much about stability (PR, mentorship, contracts) as about payouts.

The numbers

Trinity Gaming has not filed or disclosed standalone revenue and profit figures at any point in its public record, before or after the acquisition — its financials are consolidated into acquirer NODWIN Gaming’s group accounts. The closest verifiable proxy is NODWIN’s own consolidated performance, shown here for context on the scale of the group Trinity now sits inside; these are NODWIN figures, not Trinity’s own.

• NODWIN’s FY18 to FY25 growth (from roughly ₹18 crore to over ₹500 crore) spans the period before Trinity joined the group, and reflects NODWIN’s separate esports-events and IP business (Inc42, 2025).
• Trinity’s contribution to NODWIN’s post-2024 numbers is not broken out separately in any source found for this piece — a genuine disclosure gap, not an oversight in this reporting.

Where the money comes from

Trinity does not publish a segment or geography split of its own revenue. What is verifiable is the shape of its business lines and client base, which point to where the money most plausibly comes from:

• Brand and OEM partnerships: named campaigns for Samsung, Realme and iQOO — consumer electronics brands that routinely spend on gaming-audience marketing (Inc42, December 2024).
• Gaming publisher deals: a relationship with Krafton, publisher of BGMI, one of India’s largest mobile esports titles (Inc42, December 2024).
• Creator-side monetisation: YouTube MCN and Meta CSP services across a roster the company put at over 1,000 creators at the time of the 2024 deal (Inc42, December 2024).

The surprise, if there is one, is how little of Trinity’s disclosed business is about esports competition itself. Despite the “Gaming” in its name and its roots in the esports-adjacent creator scene, its documented revenue lines are almost entirely creator management and brand marketing services — the esports-tournament side of the business that its new parent NODWIN is known for sits with NODWIN, not with Trinity.

The risks

• Platform dependency: Trinity’s core service — MCN and CSP support — exists only because YouTube and Meta run partner programmes with specific monetisation and policy rules. A platform algorithm or monetisation-policy change affects Trinity’s entire roster at once, not one creator at a time.
• Talent concentration and churn: the agency’s core asset is contracted, mobile individuals rather than owned property. Creators can renegotiate, go independent, or move to a rival agency once they have built an audience with Trinity’s support — a structural risk common to every talent-management business.
• Governance and priority risk inside a larger group: Trinity is now a subsidiary of NODWIN Gaming, which itself was reclassified by Nazara Technologies from subsidiary to associate company, reducing Nazara’s board control as NODWIN raises outside capital and prepares for a possible IPO (Inc42, 2025). Trinity’s strategic priority inside that structure depends on decisions made above it, not by its own founders alone.

The takeaway

Trinity Gaming’s story argues against the assumption that every startup needs venture capital to scale. It grew a four-figure creator roster and named-brand client list over five years on internally generated cash, then used that same discipline as its negotiating position when a listed group came to buy it — the deal gave its founders equity in the acquirer rather than simply cashing them out. The lesson generalises beyond gaming: a services business built around people, not product, can compound quietly for years without a funding announcement, and still end up as the acquisition target rather than the acquirer, precisely because it never had to answer to an outside investor’s timeline.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Trinity Gaming and when?

Trinity Gaming was founded in 2019 by Abhishek Aggarwal and Shivam Rao, who set out to build professional support infrastructure for Indian gaming content creators (Sportskeeda, 2021).

Did Trinity Gaming raise venture capital before it was acquired?

No institutional funding round is publicly disclosed for Trinity Gaming at any point before its 2024 acquisition; the company operated on a bootstrapped basis.

Who owns Trinity Gaming now?

NODWIN Gaming, the esports arm majority-linked to listed Nazara Technologies, has owned 100% of Trinity Gaming since acquiring it for ₹24 crore in November 2024 (Inc42, AFAQS, Exchange4Media, December 2024).

What was Trinity Gaming worth when it was acquired?

The deal valued Trinity Gaming at ₹24 crore (~$2.5 million), paid as ₹4.8 crore in cash and a ₹19.2 crore stock swap (Inc42, December 2024).

How many creators does Trinity Gaming manage?

The company said it worked with more than 1,000 content creators at the time of its acquisition in November 2024, up from over 200 creators reported in 2021 (Sportskeeda, 2021; Inc42, December 2024).

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Sportskeeda, “We help new content creators grow…” — interview with Abhishek Aggarwal, Co-Founder & CEO, Trinity Gaming (2021)
• Inc42, “Nazara’s NODWIN Buys Trinity Gaming For INR 24 Cr” (December 2024)
• AFAQS, “Nazara’s NODWIN Gaming acquires Trinity Gaming in Rs 24 crore deal” (December 2024)
• Exchange4Media, “NODWIN Gaming acquires Trinity Gaming in Rs 24-cr deal” (December 2024)
• Inc42, “No Longer Under Nazara’s Wing, Can Nodwin Gaming Level Up?” (2025)
• Exchange4Media, “Nodwin Gaming reports Rs 658 cr revenue in FY26” (May 2026)
• The Times of India, “India’s gaming market crossed $1 billion in revenue for the first time in history, report claims” (August 2026)

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