Social media app Roposo raises fresh funding from Tiger Global, Bertelsmann

Industry:    2018-12-12

Gurgaon-based Roposo has raised $10 million (₹61 crore) from existing investors Tiger Global Management and Bertelsmann India Investments, showed documents sourced from business intelligence platform Paper.vc.

The investment comes as a part of Roposo’s extended Series C funding round, the documents showed. Last month, Relevant E-Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which operates as Roposo, raised ₹120 crore from Tech Circle Ventures and Bertelsmann India, according to data from Crunchbase.

The company has so far raised funds worth $31 million. The social media platform is also backed by Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and venture capital firm India Quotient.

The company aims to use the capital towards product technology, talent acquisition and further expansion of its community.

Rohit Sood, principal at Bertelsmann, will join Roposo’s board as a part of the deal. Pankaj Makkar, managing director at Bertelsmann India, who served on the company’s board as a director, left in June.

“The company has scaled explosively over the past year but we are most excited about the management’s focus on the quality of user engagement on the platform,” said Sood.

Roposo, which was founded in 2014, started as a platform enabling discovery for women’s and men’s fashion.

In mid 2017, the company pivoted to a social media platform model that curates content across categories such as food, travel and fashion.

Roposo offers a TV-like interface that allows users to watch videos and pictures across 24 channels.

The application is available in regional languages including Punjabi, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali and Hindi. It earns from the advertisements put up on its platform by companies and pays content creators according to the number of views.

Founded by IIT Delhi alumni, Mayank Bhangadia, Avinash Saxena and Kaushal Shubhan, Roposo plans to enter micro markets and beef up its resources for this.

“Celebrating the cultural diversity of India, we’ve constantly brought in unique innovations and enabled a monthly active user base of 7.5 million. At this rate, we are set to grow exponentially in the coming six months,” said Bhangadia, the chief executive officer of Roposo.

The company has a monthly run rate of $100,000 in revenue. The platform’s daily active user base has grown more than 75 times and it has a community of 25 million individuals currently.

Mint reported in August that investors are betting big on content start-ups, expecting to attract tens of millions of users on such platforms.

News aggregator DailyHunt, short video app Clip, Roposo, publishing platform Pratilipi and entertainment app Pocket Aces are in talks to raise anywhere between $10 million and $20 million.

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