Chennai, NFAPost: Short infotainment videos platform Bolo Indya has announced that it has completed a $300,000 Pre Series A1 round of Funding.
The funding round was led by Eagle10 Ventures, India Accelerator and HNIs. Prashant Pansare from Eagle10 has joined the Board of Directors. Sunil Kamath, ex-CBO of Sharechat and ex-SVP of Opera also participated in the round.
The investment bring Bolo Indya funding, since launching its visionary Indian language platform to $500,000 and will help the company aggressively enhance personalisation and recommendation engine, develop language evangelists and strengthen the team, broaden and accelerate product development.
Bolo Indya currently has over 40 lakh monthly active users across Playstore and OEM Appstores. Over 15 lakh videos are being created on a daily basis on Bolo Indya since June 2020.
Bolo Indya currently offers short videos creation, consumption and knowledge networking in 12 Indian Languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Haryanvi and Kannada.
The Gurugram-based user-generated content platform enables users to create two-minute videos sharing their knowledge, experience and opinions across interest areas, and taking the videos to the local language audience sharing similar interest areas. While video creators may earn as well as find a way to increase social capital, consumers become the part of a strongly knit interest-driven community.
Founded by Pramod D’Souza, a seasoned corporate product leader and Prashant Pansare, a serial entrepreneur, who has built multiple startups as well as a very active ecosystem enabler, Eagle10 Ventures is an attempt to bridge the gap between seasoned corporate leaders and startups by helping startups raise the first external round of funding.
Eagle10 Ventures Co-Founder Prashant Pansare said, “There is an exploding trend of short videos consumption. I am very confident of Varun and the team understandings and execution ability for what is a massive opportunity to build a product that would add significant value to the journey of local language internet user.”
Commenting on the announcement, Bolo Indya Founder Varun Saxena said, “We are on the mission to leverage the power of short videos, peer to peer commerce and network affect to empower every content creator of Bharat to go viral in the shortest span of time and be able to monetise by leveraging the social capital. We are working towards building a daily use case for local language short videos consumption and see ourselves to be on at least one smartphone of every Indian household with a non-English user within the span of next 18 months.”
On the mission to empower Bharat to create, inspire and network through short knowledge videos in regional languages, Bolo Indya aims to empower content creators to transform social capital to financial independence.
“With internet reaching to over 900 million people in next 3-4 years in India, the demand for User-Generated Content will increase multi-fold. With more and more people creating and consuming content in their own language, Bolo Indya will be filling that space for these over 900 million in a short duration,” India Accelerator General Manager & Partner Munish Bhatia said.
Short videos in local languages are expected to see the demand of over 80 million users by 2022, just fourth to Youtube, Payments and ecommerce.
This is where Bolo Indya wants to bring in the amalgamation of user generated content, influencer impact and structured structured discoverability to build a product that adds contextual value to the time spent on internet by regional language users.
