StartupNews.in

HashCube is a social gaming company started by school friends Deepan (26) and Ram (25). HashCube makes popular puzzle type games on social networks like Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, Friendster and mobile platforms like the iPhone.

Leveraging its success with fun educational puzzle games on Facebook, HashCube has become one of the most successful companies to launch games for the recently opened up social networks of MySpace, Orkut and Friendster. HashCube’s Sudoku application is now the most popular Sudoku app of MySpace’s 110 million monthly users.

“Users playing HashCube’s games have fun while improving their concentration memory and logical thinking. Our games generate more than 3 million page views and it is growing at 35% every month.” say the founders of HashCube. HashCube has operated out of Bangalore since 2008, and was accepted into the 2009 batch of the iAccelerator program.

With more than 300,000 monthly active users on Facebook, 3 million monthly page views, a stable of 8 games deployed on 4 different social networking and mobile platforms and significant revenue, HashCube has a proven track record of developing, deploying and monetizing educational casual games for the social and mobile platforms. They are one of the few startups which are doing more than copy pasting US stuff for India. Rather, more than 99% of their active users currently are non-Indians. With 5 more games planned, their success looks likely to continue well into the future.

HashCube, a start-up being supported under iAccelerator program at IIM Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), aims to leverage the current craze amongst youth to use applications built on these platforms. Notably, iShoot application on iPhone by a developer in the US made around Rs 3 crore in one month. Scrabulous by India’s Agarwala brothers has been one of the most popular applications on Facebook.

“Having already raised their initial investment from the iAccelerator, the team would soon be looking at raising more innovative financing. Since economics of games are more like movies, revenue sharing deals align with financing games naturally. This takes a lot of the risk out of funding startups” says Freeman Murray, Founder of Upstart.in, a co-investor and part of Management Team at iAccelerator.

HashCube’s innovation extends beyond programming as they look to alternative industries for ideas on how to finance their expansion. Borrowing a trick from the movie industry they plan to sell ‘points’ in their upcoming games entitling investors to act like producers and to directly share in the revenue of the games Hashcube develops. This provides a much clearer path for investors to get a return on their money and allows HashCube to retain more control of their company, creating a ‘win-win’ for both parties.

“We got interested in supporting Hashcube as they were doing more than just ‘games’. They are able to quickly come up with simple, logical and mentally stimulating games like Sudoku, LooptheLoop and Dot Game which a regular internet user can play the same way he has been playing other games” Pranay Gupta, Joint CEO, CIIE (IIM Ahmedabad).

“iAccelerator effectively bridges the seed-funding and mentoring gap that exists in Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are glad to support close to a dozen start-ups in this round of iAccelerator. Most of these are currently in stealth mode and we shall unleash them gradually over the next 3-4 months.” says Kunal Upadhyay, CEO, CIIE (IIM Ahmedabad).