Location-based social network, Public app, on Wednesday said it has raised an additional Rs300 crore from A91 Partners as a part of its latest funding round, which also saw participation from existing investors.
The fundraise comes six months after it raised Rs260 crore led by Flipkart-backer Lee Fixel’s Addition, along with SIG and Tanglin Venture Partners, in September last year.
The fresh funds will be utilised for rapid scaling up of tech infrastructure, content offering, and employee base speed up growth and improve retention and engagement metrics on the app.
Public App is a social network which is based on a hyper-local strategy and provides updates and happenings, around a user’s location, enabling hyper-local commerce, jobs, classifieds and more.
“We are very excited to have A91 Partners join us in our journey towards building the world’s largest location-based social network. With more than 50 million active users in India, we first aim to connect the hyper-local communities of ‘Bharat’ and later make the product global,” said Azhar Iqubal, founder and chief executive officer, Public app.
Several brands such as GSK, Amazon, HDFC Bank, have started to use Public as a medium to reach out to these audiences, the company said.
“We are building customised ad solutions for brands to better engage with the audiences while keeping the user experience intact”, added Iqubal.
The app also claims to be used by over 50,000 elected officials, government authorities and citizen journalists to connect with their locality. Additionally, many local businesses have also started to use the app to reach their customers in the locality, the company said.
“Public has continued to maintain best in class retention and engagement metrics while scaling. We look forward to working closely with the founders to help build an outstanding company,” said Gautam Mago, general partner at A91 Partners.
Public was launched by short content and news aggregator, Inshorts, in April 2019, and is available in 11 Indian languages – Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu, amongst others.
