‘Addition’ of former Tiger Global executive Lee Fixel has led a $35 Mn funding round for Public video app by media startup Inshorts
The new venture capital company ‘Addition’ of former Tiger Global executive Lee Fixel has led a $35 million funding round for Public short video app by news media startup Inshorts. In September 2019, Addition was first introduced in the US.
According to a company press release, the round also saw involvement from SIG Global and Tanglin Investment Partners.
The most recent funding round for Inshorts came after almost a three-year break. It had previously received $15 million in August 2017 from Tiger Global. The Noida-based company that publishes 60-word summaries in the form of virtual placards on major news reports will use the new proceeds to promote its newly released public location-based social network application.
“In our journey to create the world’s largest location-based social network, we are pleased to have this support from Addition, SIG Global and Tanglin Venture Partners,” said Azhar Iqubal, Founder & CEO, Public App.
The public allows individuals to document and share activities around them in top tier cities and provide local alerts in real-time. According to data sourced from Sensor Tower, Public has gathered over 60 million downloads across Android and iOS since its launch in January 2020.
Within 9 months of the beta launch, the Location-based social network Public reported a whopping 10 million users, becoming the fastest Indian social app to cross the milestone. Public enables individuals to record and share events around them, allowing local updates in real-time, especially in the cities of Tier II and Tier III. Every month, one million public videos are produced that encourage the local community to stay connected and updated. It was launched in
In the Tier 2 and 3 cities, the app is experiencing tremendous growth and has already become the No 1 ranked app on the play store in the category in a short period of 9 months.
Public, which is available in several major Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu , Tamil, Kannada , Malayalam, Odia, Assamese, Gujarati and Marathi, allows e-commerce to be powered by shop owners, serves as a classified forum and allows neighbourhood recruiters to employ workers, Iqubal said.
He said the app, which also offers entertainment and news services, has attracted over 50 million active users on a monthly basis. Every month, more than 1 million videos are produced on the platform.
“In India, there are more than 10,000 urban centres and established social networking apps aimed at connecting friends leave room for a play based on the venue,” Iqbal said.
In India, digitalization has shown a dramatic change towards the regional scenario, marking a major rise in the trend of content consumption. Recent studies by KPMG-Google say that regional language users will dominate video viewership in India and the market is expected to cross 536 million users by 2021. The exponential growth of the Public App thus reflects the increasing demand for vernacular content in the country’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. The app enables local activities in the metropolitan areas to be distributed and facilitates the consumption of relevant content in the regional communities.
