STAN, a new Indian social gaming metaverse platform, has made some waves recently. This growth is a result of recently being supported by Google’s AI Futures Fund. The startup recently enjoyed a short-lived spurt of profitability and is now embarking on strategic initiatives to grow its business. With an ambitious roadmap, STAN aims to expand its user base and enhance its offerings by leveraging advanced technology and partnerships with game developers.
Homegrown in India, STAN has rapidly emerged as a dynamic and inclusive destination for gamers. Further, the platform has surpassed 25 million downloads on the Play Store and App Store. It currently has, by their own report, close to 5.5 million monthly active users. At launch, STAN forced content creators to reach out to the STAN team to start a livestream. The company has now opened its platform to user-generated content, enabling anyone to go live and engage with the community.
To help ensure positive user experience and quality of content STAN uses artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot for content moderation. AI currently controls 70% to 80% of the moderation battle. This enables the team to be 100% focused on efficiently scaling the platform.
In the last two quarters of 2023, STAN has seen about 100 game publishers, studios, and developers join its platform. The startup has been adding more than 20 new partners each month. This boom proves its growing impact in the broader gaming world. Evidently, collaboration with industry stakeholders is equally important to getting much-needed tools into professionals’ hands, Co-founder and CEO Parth Chadha further explained, saying,
“There are a lot of interesting plug-and-play models, which we and the Google team are working together to leverage and scale the business.”
STAN’s workforce consists of about 40 employees, including fewer than 30 people focused on product engineering. This nimble organizational flow makes for a great, agile development team that fosters quick adaptation to emerging market demands.
Even with such recent success under its belt, STAN is not sitting back and taking victory laps. The priority now is for the company to reach overall profitability by 2027. To achieve this lofty goal, it intends to invest more on scaling its operations and expanding its userbase outside of India. To amplify demand, the startup is now focused on international markets. It will begin its expansion in the Indian subcontinent before heading to Southeast Asia and Latin America.
STAN’s community Chadha described STAN’s community as a space for gamers to interact socially while they’re gaming. He remarked,
“STAN is the hangout place for gamers. It’s a place where gamers come and make friends, play with each other, talk to each other, sort of a fusion of social and gaming.”
STAN’s journey on a path to growth continues, and user engagement vs. profitability will likely always be somewhat of a tightrope walk. Combined with our AI-driven moderation, this feature automatically provides STAN a monumental advantage in social gaming. At the same time, a supercharged cluster of game developers further cements its competitive advantage in this booming market.
