New Delhi, March 19 -- Mumbai-listed gaming company Nazara Technologies, which counts Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and boutique investment firm Plutus Wealth among its investors, has agreed to buy a controlling stake in Spanish startups Bluetile Games and BestPlay System for a total of Rs 918 crore ($100.3 million).
The all-cash deals will help the company scale AI-driven game development and publishing capabilities across its portfolio companies, Nazara said in a statement.
Nazara, whose individual investors include Zerodha's Nikhil Kamath and Caratlane founder Mithun Sacheti, said it will buy a 50% stake in Bluetile for $88.4 million and in Bestplay System for $11.9 million. Of this, Nazara will pay $59.7 million at the first close and the remaining amount within six months after the first close.
Nazara is making the acquisitions through its UK subsidiary. To finance the deal, it will inject about $40.1 million as equity capital into the UK unit and provide a loan of $60.2 million to the subsidiary.
Nazara CEO Nitish Mittersain said the acquisitions bring proven strengths across game development, player engagement and distribution, and will add "meaningful synergies" to the company's global gaming platform.
"The team has embedded AI at the core of its operations - not just as a tool, but as a competitive advantage across development, marketing and live operations. This acquisition marks an important step in our strategy to build AI-enabled, globally scalable gaming businesses," he said.
The two Barcelona-headquartered companies are led by founder Raymond Stauffer, an MIT alumnus and former Google executive. He had previously worked at gaming and technology companies, including Zynga, King, Voodoo, Moonactive and Meta.
Bluetile Games is a mobile gaming company offering a portfolio of casual mobile games across globally popular genres such as puzzles, sorting and tilebased formats, including titles such as Yatzy, Domino Legends, Mahjong Voyage, Spade Stars among others. It boasts of 375 million downloads and 22 million monthly active users across 17 live games. BestPlay is its in-house rewarded engagement platform, which helps with player acquisition, retention and cross-promotion engine across its game portfolio.
The two entities together had a combined turnover of $153.6 million and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $27.7 million.
Nazara also holds a 'call option' to buy the remaining 50% stake in the companies by 2028 at a multiple of 6.6x the operating profit in the trailing calendar year.
Further, the deal includes transaction-linked payout of 98.2 million (Rs 898 crore), if the companies deliver the agreed revenue and EBITDA targets for the calendar years 2027 through 2029. Nazra said a substantial portion of this consideration will be funded through the acquired companies' operating cash flows and distributions.
"By combining Bluetile's AI-driven development and live-operations capabilities with BestPlay's rewarded engagement and distribution platform, alongside Nazara's global publishing, IP and distribution ecosystem, the partnership is expected to accelerate the creation, optimisation and global scaling of next-generation casual and social gaming titles," Nazara said.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.