Homegrown social live streaming platform Bolo Live announced that it has raised $2.4 million as a precursor to Series A, led by Orios Venture Partners.
SOSV, Tremis Capital, LPA Ventures, and other HNIs also participated in its first VC round including existing investors Eagle 10 Ventures. This takes the total funds raised by the company to $3.5 million till date.
Launched in May 2019, Bolo Live is an amalgamation of live streaming, gamification, and micro-transactions. The platform helps content creators monetise leveraging live streaming. The platform enables users to connect, live chat, engage with and build communities with their favourite live streamers in their preferred languages. Co-founded by second-time entrepreneur and NITIE alumnus Varun Saxena, and Delhi University alumna Tanmai Paul; Ex Co-Founder Pratilipi and BITS Pilani alumnus Prashant had recently joined the Bolo Live team as CTO.
The company will utlise the funds to accelerate the product development, strengthen the team and drive penetration in both India and South Asia markets.
Varun Saxena, Co-founder and CEO Bolo Live, said, “We are delighted to have Orios Venture Partners join us as our first institutional investors in our journey to build a large social live-streaming platform out of India. Their experience with world-class startups from India would help us accelerate our path towards making Bolo Live a household name.”
“With the world looking at Indian content creators, there is no better time than this to build a micro-transactions driven creator economy platform in India. We have witnessed high stickiness, driven by gamification and communities, and look forward to creating more value for all our users. We will continue to innovate on more monetization opportunities for our content creators and keep bringing them closer to their fan base.” he further added.
Rehan Yar Khan, Managing Partner, Orios Venture Partners said “There is an accelerating trend of live streaming and content commerce in India. Bolo Live team’s understanding, enthusiasm, the way they have built differentiation and are scaling it up in this competitive environment, drove our decision to invest in the brand. Their engagement first approaches and focus on high user retention clearly makes them stand apart in the growing social live streaming segment”.
The platform has over one lakh content creators monetising on the platform, and creator retention is 80 per cent. The platform is at a more than a $1 million net revenue run rate. This, coupled with consistent growth in active user base has led to over 3x increase in net revenue over the last six months, it said.
