Vernacular online discussion platform startup Manch, an early stage content platform has raised a $750K seed round financing led by Stellaris Venture Partners.
Manch is an interest-driven vernacular platform that allows users to discuss and react to their areas of interest whether it be news, cricket, local elections, festivals or events. Users can search, follow or create content mapped to interests or location. The company will use the cash to build its technology and product team to fuel the product innovation.
“I had my eureka moment when I travelled to villages across the country last summer and participated in evening Panchayats with locals. People living in small town and cities mostly seek news and content relevant to their interest and – given we are a country of opinions – actively engage in discussions around these topics in their local groups,” said
aid CEO & co-founder Pritam Roy.
“There is a need for a medium where people can express their opinion on everyday news and events and can explore content mapped to their interest in their own language. At Manch, we are focused on understanding this behaviour and reimagining the medium which best captures the opinions of the next 500 million vernacular users,” Roy said.
Manch today has more than 30k monthly active users. Manch wants to create a platform for the next 500 million users journey as they graduate to express themselves facilitated by a platform that reimagines the medium of expression for them. The focus is on creating the right product to build an engaging community and to create content across multiple formats (video, audio, image, text).
“India has ~230 million Indian-language speaking internet users today who lack a platform to express themselves as the existing platforms cater to only ~175 million English speaking internet users of the country. We believe this is a huge opportunity. The existing platforms catering to the vernacular audience focus on content consumption use cases and nobody has tried to build a community or discussion platform for local audience,” said
Rahul Chowdhri, partner, Stellaris Venture Partners.
“This audience uses chat groups for following their interests (job, jokes, news etc.) but the user experience is broken. We feel that Manch is solving for a huge latent need by creating a discussions platform for the vernacular audience,” said Chowdhri.
