In 2006, the two cofounders played their best hand with rummy. The engineer-turned-economist duo, though, tasted success by building a multi-gaming platform, Games 24x7
Rummy,” explains RummyCircle on its website, “is a card game that is played with two decks of cards with total of two Jokers.” Almost three years after dealing with a bad hand, Bhavin Pandya and Trivikraman Thampy looked like two jokers to bankers. “Are you guys serious? Is this even legal?” asked one of the top honchos of an MNC bank. Sitting across the table, and in the firing line, were two friends who co-founded Games24x7 in 2006. They started with a free online rummy game, chess and a bunch of other casual games, somehow survived the global financial crisis of 2008, and were now rolling out RummyCircle, their first paid online rummy platform.
For Pandya and Thampy, the chips were down. A prerequisite for a paid online game was a payment gateway. Unfortunately, the duo didn’t have any, and were now pleading, and building their case, with banks and companies processing online payments.
(This story appears in the 17 June, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)