Startup Deep Dive : Loco — how a trivia app’s game-streaming bet ended in a fire-sale exit

In September 2024, a newly floated Abu Dhabi investment firm called Redwood took majority control of Loco, India’s best-known game-streaming platform, for $65 million (₹530 crore) — a deal that gave every one of Loco’s existing backers a full cash exit, as reported by TechCrunch and confirmed by investor Lumikai. That price sat well below the near $150-200 million valuation the company had commanded just two and a half years earlier, after a $42 million Series A round in March 2022 that Adgully and Business Standard called one of the largest of its kind in Indian gaming history.

The stranger part of the story is what Loco used to be. Before a single gamer ever streamed on it, the app was called Showtime — a live trivia quiz show that paid contestants real cash for right answers, built by three engineers with no gaming pedigree at all. It took a government ban on a mobile game, a pandemic-era surge in screen time, and a decision to tear up the product to turn a quiz app into what its own founders called an attempt to build “a platform at the heart of” global gaming culture.

Quick facts

What they do

Loco is a live-streaming app built around video games: it lets streamers broadcast themselves playing titles such as BGMI, Free Fire, Call of Duty Mobile and GTA V, while viewers watch, chat and send paid virtual gifts in real time. Alongside creator-led streams, Loco broadcasts esports tournaments in partnership with publishers including Krafton, Activision, Ubisoft and Riot Games, and content tie-ups with brands such as Red Bull and the global esports organisation Fnatic. Its core users are two distinct groups it has to keep happy at once: streamers who need an audience and a payout, and viewers who come for competitive gaming content that Indian television and Twitch — which has a limited footprint in the country — do not fully serve.

The origin

Loco’s founding insight had nothing to do with gaming. Engineer Abhishek Madhavan, working with Chetan Dembre and Sushil Kumar, built an app called Showtime around a simple idea: turn a television-style live quiz show into an app where thousands of people played the same ten questions at 1:30pm and 10pm every day, with winners splitting real cash prizes. It found rapid organic traction, and in January 2018 the founders sold it to Pocket Aces — the Mumbai-based digital entertainment company behind FilterCopy and Dice Media, founded in 2013 by Anirudh Pandita, Ashwin Suresh and Aditi Shrivastava — in a deal Entrackr reported at roughly $1 million. The app was renamed Loco and run as one of Pocket Aces’ content verticals, with Madhavan and his co-founders joining the parent company.

The struggle years

The quiz format was never going to be the whole business, and Loco spent its first two years searching for a second act. The turn came in 2019, when India’s battle-royale gaming boom — driven by PUBG Mobile and later Free Fire — gave Pocket Aces a reason to test live game streaming inside the same app. By early 2020, Loco had fully repositioned itself as a game-streaming and esports-broadcasting platform, a pivot that Pocket Aces’ own communications credited to the “seismic shift” in how young Indians were spending screen time. The years that followed were not a clean growth story:

• July 2022: days after the government’s restrictions on titles including PUBG-linked games rattled the esports ecosystem, Loco slashed streamer payouts — from ₹10 per watch-hour for the first 5,000 hours to ₹4 per hour, and just ₹2 per hour beyond 10,000 hours — while also withholding an entire month’s pay from any creator flagged for over 25% suspected fraudulent views, as reported by Entrackr.
• Rival platform Rooter cut creator pay by 50-60% in the same window, showing the squeeze was industry-wide and not unique to Loco’s finances, per the same Entrackr report.
• November 2023: Loco laid off 40 of its roughly 110 employees — more than a third of its headcount — as it began pulling back from the advertising-heavy strategy it had bet on, according to Storyboard18.
• By mid-2024, Storyboard18 reported that Loco’s advertising-video-on-demand (AVOD) model had “failed,” with the company having spent heavily on tournament streaming rights without matching returns, leaving some broadcasts down to “a handful of streamers” pulling audiences of 30 to 40 viewers.

None of this was fatal on its own — Loco kept operating and testing new formats throughout — but it set up a company that had raised $51 million on a growth story to instead spend 2023 and 2024 cutting costs and admitting, in its own words to Storyboard18, that it was “experiencing a slowdown.”

The turning point

The clearest single break in Loco’s history is the September 2024 sale of a majority stake to Redwood Tech FZCO. On one side of that transaction sat the number investors had been chasing since 2022: a Series A that valued the company at somewhere between $150 million and $200 million, backed by South Korea’s Hashed, gaming publisher Krafton and India’s Lumikai. On the other side sat the number the deal actually closed at — $65 million, structured as a mix of primary capital into the company and secondary shares that let every existing backer walk away in cash, as reported by TechCrunch, DealStreetAsia and PocketGamer.biz. Co-founder Ashwin Suresh told Storyboard18 the company was deliberately turning away from its home market: “India is no longer a priority due to the declining growth of esports, largely caused by multiple regulatory restrictions on gaming,” he said, adding that a market built on “just one or two titles” could not sustain healthy growth. The company’s next chapter, he said, would be built in Latin America, the Middle East, South East Asia and Europe instead.

The money behind it

Loco’s fundraising ran in two distinct phases — one as a Pocket Aces vertical seeking independence, the other as a scaling platform chasing a category-leader valuation.

• Seed round, June 2021, $9 million: led jointly by Krafton (maker of BGMI/PUBG Mobile) and Lumikai, India’s first dedicated gaming and interactive media fund, with Hashed, Hiro Capital, North Base Media, Axilor Ventures and 3one4 Capital also participating; this round funded Loco’s spin-off into an independent company from Pocket Aces.
• Series A, March 2022, $42 million (about ₹330 crore, as reported at the time): led by Hashed, with Makers Fund, Catamaran Ventures and Korea Investment Partners joining alongside returning investors Krafton, Lumikai and Hiro Capital, per Entrackr and Business Standard.
• Total raised before the Redwood deal: $51 million across the two rounds, per Inc42 and TechCrunch.
• September 2024, $65 million majority-stake sale to Redwood Tech FZCO: the transaction that replaced all of the above investors with a single UAE-based owner and gave Loco fresh capital for international expansion.

What each backer changed: Krafton gave Loco direct access to the publisher of India’s most-streamed mobile game; Lumikai brought category-specific expertise as a gaming-only fund; Hashed’s lead on the Series A signalled international VC appetite for Indian gaming infrastructure at a moment when the category was unproven; and Redwood’s buyout, whatever its exact valuation, converted Loco from a venture-backed Indian startup into a foreign-owned platform explicitly deprioritising the Indian market it was built for.

How it makes money

Loco’s business model sits on three legs, and the company’s own recent history shows how unevenly they have carried the weight:

• Advertising (AVOD): the model Loco leaned on hardest through 2022-2023, selling ad inventory against live streams and tournament broadcasts; Storyboard18 reported this approach had “failed” by mid-2024 after heavy spending on tournament streaming rights did not generate matching returns.
• Subscriptions and virtual purchases: a VIP membership tier launched with entry pricing from ₹20, which The Streaming Lab reported (June 2024, citing company data) drove a tenfold increase in on-platform transactions and a 50% rise in watch hours after launch, with average daily revenue per user quoted at ₹150.
• Esports and brand partnerships: tournament broadcasting rights and content deals with publishers (Krafton, Activision, Ubisoft, Riot Games) and brands (Red Bull, Fnatic), which build audience and prestige more than they generate direct revenue on their own.

On the cost side, the part outsiders consistently underestimate is what it costs to pay the streamers who create the content in the first place: Loco’s 2022 rate card paid ₹10 per watch-hour for a creator’s first 5,000 monthly hours, falling to ₹4 and then ₹2 per hour at higher volumes — a structure that ties Loco’s biggest variable cost directly to the same watch-hours that determine its ad and subscription revenue, per Entrackr’s reporting on the rate cuts. When advertising income did not scale as fast as those payout obligations, margins were squeezed from both sides at once, which is a large part of why FY24 revenue fell 12.9% even as the net loss narrowed.

The numbers

Loco’s financials are tracked by Inc42 under the registered entity through which its regulatory filings are made, Pocket Aces Pictures Private Limited. Only two full fiscal years of verified, filed figures are publicly available:

Revenue fell 12.9% year-on-year in FY24, even as the net loss improved by roughly 22% from FY23 — a company cutting costs faster than it was losing sales, rather than one returning to growth, per Inc42’s tracking of the filings. Earlier fiscal years (FY21, FY22) are not available in any filing tracker checked for this piece and have been left out rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

Loco does not publish a formal geographic or product-line revenue split in its filings, but its own disclosed engagement data (The Streaming Lab, June 2024, citing company figures) shows where its business actually concentrates:

• Registered base of 60 million users accumulated since the platform’s 2020 relaunch, against roughly 10 million monthly active users and 2-3 million daily active users — a wide gap between sign-ups and habitual users that is typical of ad-funded streaming apps.
• 100,000-plus creators on the platform, with sign-ups reported to have grown fourfold year-on-year as of mid-2024, though later reporting from Storyboard18 the same year described some tournament broadcasts drawing only 30-40 live viewers — a sign the creator base is far larger than the audience each individual stream commands.
• 17 million live watch hours a month is the company-stated engagement figure underpinning both its ad sales and its per-watch-hour creator payouts.
• Geographic concentration in India until the 2024 ownership change, after which the company explicitly said it would build new revenue in Latin America, the Middle East, South East Asia and Europe instead, per Ashwin Suresh’s comments to Storyboard18 — the surprise being that a platform built entirely for Indian gamers is now being steered away from India by its own founders.

The risks

• Regulatory dependence on a shrinking pool of titles: India’s bans on PUBG Mobile (2020) and later BGMI disrupted the exact battle-royale ecosystem Loco was built to stream; co-founder Ashwin Suresh told Storyboard18 the sector “cannot sustain growth” on “just one or two titles,” which is a structural risk the company itself has named rather than one outsiders are speculating about.
• A monetisation model that has already failed once: the AVOD strategy Loco spent 2022-2023 building around was reported by Storyboard18 to have collapsed by mid-2024 despite heavy spending on tournament rights, with no guarantee the subscription model now being tested will scale to replace that lost revenue.
• Creator supply tied to a pay structure that squeezes at scale: because payouts fall as a streamer’s watch-hours rise (from ₹10 to ₹4 to ₹2 per hour, per Entrackr), Loco’s most successful creators are also its most expensive to retain, creating an incentive for top talent to migrate to platforms like Twitch, Kick or YouTube Gaming that pay differently at scale.

The takeaway

Loco’s arc is a reminder that a platform’s product can pivot faster than its economics can follow. Rebuilding a trivia app into a genuine esports broadcaster took less than a year; building a monetisation model sturdy enough to support that new product took the company through a funding boom, a 36% headcount cut, a failed advertising bet and, ultimately, a change of ownership — and it still is not fully solved. The lesson for anyone chasing a big content-platform pivot is not that pivots do not work; Loco’s did, in the sense that it found a real product and a real audience. It is that finding the audience and finding a business model durable enough to keep paying for that audience are two separate problems, on two separate timelines, and the second one usually takes far longer than founders plan for.

Frequently asked questions

What does Loco do?

Loco is an Indian live-streaming platform for video games, where streamers broadcast gameplay of titles such as BGMI, Free Fire and GTA V and viewers watch, chat and send paid virtual gifts; it also broadcasts esports tournaments through partnerships with publishers including Krafton, Activision, Ubisoft and Riot Games.

Who owns Loco now?

UAE-based Redwood Tech FZCO has held majority control of Loco since September 2024, when it paid $65 million for a majority stake and gave every prior investor — including Krafton, Lumikai and Hashed — a full cash exit, as reported by TechCrunch and Lumikai itself. Founders Anirudh Pandita and Ashwin Suresh continue to run the company.

How much money has Loco raised?

Loco raised $51 million in venture funding across a $9 million seed round in June 2021 and a $42 million Series A in March 2022, before the $65 million majority-stake sale to Redwood in September 2024 replaced its investor base entirely, per Inc42 and TechCrunch.

Is Loco profitable?

No. Loco’s registered entity reported a net loss of ₹14.0 crore in FY24 on revenue of ₹90.4 crore, which was down 12.9% from ₹103.7 crore in FY23, according to Inc42’s tracking of its filings; the loss narrowed by about 22% year-on-year even as revenue fell.

Why did Loco’s Indian backers exit?

The company has not disclosed a single reason, but co-founder Ashwin Suresh told Storyboard18 that India’s esports growth was “declining” because of “multiple regulatory restrictions on gaming” and reliance on “just one or two” popular titles, and that Loco would prioritise Latin America, the Middle East, South East Asia and Europe going forward — a shift that coincided with a failed advertising-revenue model and a 2023 round of layoffs.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “Loco — Funding, Revenue & Investors,” company profile, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Loco Financials 2026 — Revenue, P&L and Cash Flow,” accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Digital Entertainment Startup Pocket Aces Acquires Interactive Game Show App Loco,” January 2018
• Entrackr, “Sequoia-backed Pocket Aces reportedly acquires quiz game app Loco for $1 Mn,” January 2018
• Entrackr, “Game streaming platform Loco raises $42 Mn led by Hashed,” March 2022
• Entrackr, “Video game live streamers on Rooter and Loco face steep pay cuts,” October 2022
• TechCrunch, “Indian game streaming platform Loco raises $42 million from Hashed, Makers Fund,” March 2022
• TechCrunch, “Indian game streaming startup Loco sells majority stake to Redwood,” September 2024
• Storyboard18, “Loco’s AVOD model fails, will it bounce back?,” 2024
• Storyboard18, “Loco sells majority of stake to UAE based tech company, says India not a priority,” September 2024
• DealStreetAsia, “Indian gaming platform Loco sells majority stake to UAE’s Redwood for $65m,” September 2024
• PocketGamer.biz, “Redwood acquires majority stake in Indian games streaming start-up Loco for $65m,” September 2024
• Lumikai, “Lumikai sees an all-cash exit from Loco,” September 2024
• The Streaming Lab, “Loco: Leveling Up Indian E-Sports and Gaming,” June 2024
• Avalanche (avax.network), “Leading Indian Game Streaming Platform, Loco, to Create Next Generation Fan Experiences on Avalanche,” March 2023
• Adgully, “Loco raises INR 330 crores, one of the largest Series A funding rounds in India,” March 2022
• Business Standard, “India’s gaming startup Loco gets $42 mn from South Korea’s Hashed, others,” March 2022

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.