Our Investment in PlayShifu
By Som Pal Choudhury, Shyam Menon, Kailash Nath and Kunal Upadhyay
Tectonic Shifts in the Toy Industry…
Just like in most industries, the USD 90 Billion global Toy Industry is also going through a tectonic shift, both technologically and culturally. Historically, we have seen children play with physical toys in the early and formative years, graduating to video and online games in the early teens. Importance of playing with tactical, physical and 3D objects and experiences, especially in the formative years of a child is of key importance in a child’s development as highlighted in many neurological and pediatric studies over the years. For most parents who have gone through these phases, we have seen how our little ones have graduated from playing with physical toys like MEGABLOK and LEGO, to playing FIFA on Xbox and eventually graduating to PUBG, Fortnight and other online games in the tweens and teens.
In fact, the Toy industry has a word called ‘CHASM’, describing the sharp fall-off and dip in revenue as the children in a household grow up, stop spending time with physical tactile toys and move over to the world of video games and the online world. Unfortunately this ‘chasm’ is coming sooner and sooner in the recent years for the toy industry with super-early introduction of tablets and smartphones to the kids. The kids today are seeing the world more in ‘2D’ instead of the real ‘3D world’ with its associated physical aspects of orientation, gesture, posture, touch and feel.
At the same time most parents feel their kids spend way too much time on smartphones and tablets, watching videos and playing games non stop. Restricting ‘Screen Time’ is something parents everywhere are concerned about. While parents understand some amount of screen time is unavoidable, they want to ensure that their kids are learning something useful during that time as well. This has resulted in the category of ‘Learning and Educational Toys and Games’ increasing at a much faster rate than the stagnating Toys industry. This category is also classified under STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), STEAM (add Art) and STREAM (add Robotics) under the Toys and Games industry.
Toys industry is going through this massive transformation as we speak, experimenting with smart toys, Toys-to-Life, creating augmented and virtual reality experiences of the physical world toys, aiming to retain the attention of the child while also appealing to the parent — the buyer.
Our Thoughts in the AR/VR and Vision space…
At Bharat Innovation Fund, we had explored a plethora of vision analytics and Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality startups over the past year. While we looked at several startups building components of the stack, platforms and frameworks, our view was that a Full-Stack experience focused on a specific vertical with a compelling use-case may have better scaling prospects.
Creating a Phygital experience in ‘early learning’
Founded in 2016, headquartered in Bangalore and with an office in Bay Area, PlayShifu is re-imagining toys, creating Phygital (Physical + Digital) experiences for kids in the age group of 3–11, with their proprietary Augmented Reality and Vision technology stack. The Phygital experience enables a child to play and interact with the physical world objects, experiencing the touch and orientation in 3D space and combining it with gamification and story-telling in the virtual world. Further, the physical toys, virtual games and storylines are designed scientifically for kids to learn as they play, across various elements of mathematics, science, geography, history, culture, creativity and so on.
What we liked about PlayShifu…
PlayShifu team is a committed mix of technology stack developers in augmented reality and computer vision, 2D/3D modelers, game developers, UI/UX designers, toy designers, content creators and story-tellers working together to orchestrate magical edutainment experiences for the kids. The team is ably led by Vivek Goyal and Dinesh Advani, two young dads juggling toddlers and technology building smart toys in their workday!
We liked the fact that the PlayShifu team had complete control of the experience to the end user. For example, the response and loading times of games were optimized taking into consideration the challenge of keeping the attention of young kids.
During the course of our due diligence, we were encouraged by the positive reviews and responses from parents, teachers and distributors globally. We also liked the approach PlayShifu had adopted of taking feedback early on from focus groups to kickstarter campaigns and using the feedback to constantly iterate the products. We were also very impressed by the responsiveness of the team and their razor sharp focus on execution.
We strongly believe in the capability of Indian entrepreneurs to develop highly innovative products and solutions for the global market and PlayShifu fits squarely within this thesis. Along with all our co-investors, we wish the PlayShifu team the very best and we are glad to partner with them on the next leg of the growth story!
About the Authors:
Som Pal Choudhury is a Partner at Bharat Innovation Fund. He tweets @sompalchoudhury.
Shyam Menon is a is a Partner at Bharat Innovation Fund.
Kailash Nath is a Senior Associate at Bharat Innovation Fund. He tweets @Kailash_nath.
Kunal Upadhyay is a Partner at Bharat Innovation Fund. He tweets @kunalupadhyay.
About Bharat Innovation Fund:
Set-up in affiliation with CIIE, Bharat Innovation Fund backs fearless entrepreneurs building deep-tech innovation led companies of consequence from India. We believe India’s talent, data and cost advantage makes India uniquely poised to produce globally-competitive tech innovations which will be global game-changers. We invest at early stages of ventures — typically writing our first check during pre-Series-A to Series-B rounds of start-ups.
