Gurugram-based short videos sharing platform Bolo Indya has raised $400,000 led by Inflection Point Ventures (IPV). Existing investors from Eagle10 Ventures also participated in the round, which has taken the total raise by the company close to $1 million till date.
Active in local Indian languages, Bolo Indya offers a unique proposition of Bolo Meets to its 2.8 million content creators to leverage their social capital across the user base of more than 6.5 million and allows micropayments to avail one-to-one and one-to-many live video sessions with them around their expertise area. Content creators are already earning upto Rs 60,000-Rs 70,000 per month from this initiative, with more than 50,000 bookings since the launch of Bolo Meets.
Bolo Meets has emerged as a moat for Bolo Indya leading to high user engagement and creator retention, and is also catching investors' eyeballs. Top Bolo Meets categories include astrology, lifestyle, fitness, language learning, singing, dancing, stand-up comedy and instrument learning.
The raised funds will be used to enhance personalisation and recommendation engine, to further expand Bolo Meets and enhance tools to further empower the content creators during Bolo Meets sessions as well as to strengthen the team.
Varun Saxena, Founder, Bolo Indya, said, “We are on the mission to leverage the unique amalgamation of passion, content and commerce 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 building towards democratising the talent and skill of every content creator out there who loves creating short videos across interesting areas in their local languages.”
According to Mitesh Shah, Co-Founder, IPV, “There is an exploding trend of short video consumption and content commerce in India. I am very confident of the team's understanding and the way they have built differentiation around Bolo Meets and are scaling it up. Their engagement first approach and focus on high user retention clearly makes them stand apart from the clutter in short video space. IPV, with its vast investor base of CXOs from diverse industries including media and entertainment, will help Bolo Indya access a large unexplored market base and expand its network exponentially while enhancing the tech capabilities as well.”
Short videos are expected to see a huge demand in future.
“Short videos in local languages are expected to see the demand of over 80 million users by 2022, just 4th to Youtube, payments and e-commerce. This is where Bolo Indya wants to bring in video commerce for personalised online services to build a product which adds contextual value to the time spent on the internet by regional language users,” concludes Saxena.
