Homegrown short-video platform, Bolo Indya, has raised $400,000 from Inflection Point Ventures, taking the company’s total to fundraise till date to $1 million. The platform currently has 6.5 million users and is amongst the many Indian platforms trying to fill the void left by Chinese apps, TikTok, Snack Video and more being banned in India. The platform allows content creators to earn money for their content by accepting micropayments from their followers.
According to Bolo Indya, creators on the platform are already earning ₹60,000-70,000 per month from the platform’s services. The funds raised will be used to “enhance personalization” and the platform’s “recommendation engine”, the company said in its announcement.
“There is an exploding trend of short video consumption and content commerce in India,” said Mitesh Shah, co-founder, Inflection Point Ventures. “Their engagement first approach and focus on high user retention clearly makes them stand apart from the clutter in the short video space,” he added.
Short-video companies in India have been enjoying a boom since the Indian government first banned Chinese apps in the country, back in June. The first wave of the bans included TikTok, Vigo Video and Helo, three apps that are owned by Chinese Bytedance. This created a void of about 170-200 million active users who were left looking for a short-video platform to go to. The government also banned Snack Video last month, which is another Chinese short video platform, that had been leading the industry since the ban on TikTok.
Since then, well-funded companies like ShareChat, DailyHunt and Times Internet have launched their own short video apps, in Moj, Josh and MX Taka Tak, respectively. Social media giant, Facebook, also rolled out Reels, which is a short-video feature that’s part of Instagram. Moj had amassed over 80 million monthly active users (MAUs) in September, while Josh had 50 million MAUs.
