May 12, 2016 (Kanpur)
ShabdaNagari, a social media start up catering to the niche Hindi content consuming audience, raised an undisclosed amount of bridge funding from ah! Ventures. Through ah! Ventures the start up has been strongly backed by key investors like Yogesh Chaudhary from Jaipur Rugs,Anirudh Damani from Artha Energy Project and Abhimanyu Singh from TaskUs.
ShabdaNagari, a start up with a unique proposition is grabbing eyeballs at a lightning speed.Today’s world is witnessing an ever increasing internet penetration and rapid growth in the usage of social media and the trend seems to be going nothing but north in the days to come. Given the diversity in a country like India, this scenario becomes all the more enthralling. ShabdaNagari effectively offers a social media platform, carved to, specifically cater to the Hindi speaking audience of today. With data suggesting over 66 crore Hindi speaking individuals in India, of which merely 5% – 10% being comfortable in communicating in English, the vernacular market reflects a huge need gap that hasn’t been answered up until now. With an objective to be the bridge that connects this audience and utilizes the bubbling potential in the vernacular market of India, ShabdaNagari was born in January, 2015.
A brainchild of 3 founders, Amitesh Misra, Nikhil Tiwari and Amaresh Chandra Misra, with varied core competencies, gives ShabdaNagari its entrepreneurial and executional edge over the others. Amitesh Misra is a 2007 IIT Bombay alumnus comes with a rich corporate experience of working with numerous multinational organizations prior to entering the entrepreneurial circuit.Nikhil Tiwari, a B-Tech in Information Technology, is one of the key cornerstones in the enterprise as his par excellence programming skills. He helps the platform offer one of the best user experiences to the audience. Amaresh Chandra Misra, a lawyer with over 25 years of experience, offers the enterprise a completely different and vital support in terms of compliance and legal aspects. ShabdaNagari, now has a strong team of 15 employees and has recently included 2 new promoters, Kalpnesh Gupta and Gopal Sutwala, who primarily handle the marketing activities of the company.
Given the fact that ShabdaNagari has, in a short span of time, witnessed around 2 lakh unique hits and 8 lakh page views on the platform and high downloads of the ShabdaNagari Android App launched last September, this fresh round of funding proves to be a much needed fuel. The company aims to utilize the funds mainly for its product development, marketing and promotional activities.
Commenting on ShabdaNagari as an offering to the ever growing Hindi speaking market, co – founder, Amitesh Misra says, “ShabdaNagari is the first platform on internet that offers social media services in Hindi. Competition in this space is scarce and still catching up. ShabdaNagari has a number of benefits on ease of access and usability. Availability of 5 different input options for typing Hindi on the platform is the one of the biggest advantages on ShabdaNagari over others.”
With more than 80% of the traffic coming from India and around 10% coming from USA, UAE and Canada, this platform is seeing a surge in the number of users on the domestic as well as on the international front.
Giving an investor’s perspective, Harshad Lahoti, founder and CEO of ah! Ventures opined,“India as a market is unique owing to its specific consumer needs. Products that wish to succeed need to be designed in order to cater to those specific needs. ShabdaNagari caught our attention and won investor trust because it had precisely carved a product that catered to those needs. The team’s thorough understanding of the Hindi speaking market and their innovative solutions to the various requirements make them stand apart. The positive results we have witnessed in the last one year makes us confident that ShabdaNagari is soon to be the biggest player this niche category.”
ah! Ventures is India’s first full-spectrum startup investment network and platform comprising of over 700+ investors, including some of the renowned angels and early-stage VCs. CLUB ah! platform today has over 8000+ startups, 625+ seed/angel investors and over 75 VCs & institutional investors, making it one of the largest platform of investors and startups. The network also last year secured its first profitable exit from Ed-tech venture Harness Handitouch within 2 years of its investment. CLUB ah! has till date invested close to INR 75 crores in over 24 startups spread across varied industries and domains, including ShabdaNagari.
On working with ah! Ventures, co-founder Amitesh Misra said, “ah! Ventures has been instrumental in helping us close this deal. The proactive approach that Team ah! has taken to close this round in a timely manner was very effective. The team is very professional and it has the complete range of services on startup funding”.
In addition to the ah! Angels like Yogesh Chaudhary, Anirudh Damani and Abhimanyu Singh, ShabdaNagari has also been backed by investors like Abhishek Singhania from the JK Group,Manoj Agrawal from Kanpur Plastipack and Rakesh Suri from Suri Shoes.
With internet usage on a continuous rise in tier II cities and villages of India, consumption of vernacular content shall inevitably be on the rise. ShabdaNagari is ready to be the forerunner in catering to this market and is in the process of making a few branding revamps to connect with the audience in a better and a simpler way.
We wish ShabdaNagari stupendous growth and immense success in the days to come.