Actor Akshay Kumar-backed content platform Social Swag on Friday said it has raised $3.5 million in a pre-Series A funding from IMEF (India Media and Entertainment Fund) and Unicorn India Ventures.
The round also saw participation from Vinay Agarwal, Ritesh Deshmukh, Raghu Subramanian and Edward Menezes, along with The Shekama Family Trust and The Blume Founders fund.
SNK Advisors advised Social Swag on the transaction.
Social Swag, which is being run by Social Swag Technology Pvt Ltd, was launched in 2020 by actor Rana Daggubati and Tennis player Mahesh Bhupati along with talent agency Collective Artists Network and Akshay Kumar.
As an influencer commerce platform, Social Swag claims to be growing 40% on a month-on-month basis over the last five months.
The company has offerings across masterclasses, live learning and personal shout outs, among others.
Social Swag runs on subscription and offers unlimited access to content on its platform.
Celebrities including Dutta, Bhavish Aggarwal, Abhinav Bindra, Akshay Kumar, Vicky Ratnani and Avinash Gowarikar are among others, who conduct masterclasses on the platform.
The company said it aims to become the biggest ‘made-in-India’ content platform for the world.
“We are excited to welcome our new investors and our focus will remain to create a platform where various people will find relevant content for themselves across different products. These would be a mix of entertainment, self-development, skill enhancement and passion content,” said Daggubati.
The company claims to have been betting on professional content creators’ platform and said that there are over 1,50,000 professional content creators in India who are able to monetize their services, while the content creators’ economy is estimated to be over $100 billion.
“As a fund, we strongly believe that the content creator economy is ripe for explosive growth. We have been tracking Social Swag for close to 6 months now and are very bullish on the moat they have been able to create vis-a-vis access to talent and building technology to make it accessible,” said Bhaskar Majumdar, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures.