Delhi-based startup, which offers a cloud-based mobile surveys platform for research companies and brands, has received an undisclosed amount in angel funding from a string of individual investors besides Blume Ventures and Palaash Ventures, a Delhi-based early stage fund.
Sachin Bhatia, co-founder at MakeMyTrip; Sidharth Rao, CEO and co-founder at Webchutney; Narayanan Shadagopan, managing director at Pragati Equity Advisors; Vikas Taneja, senior partner and managing director at The Boston Consulting Group; and angel investor Ramesh Haridas also participated in the round.
Blume Ventures had recently disclosed it has added VoxApp to its portfolio in the first half of this year. The early stage investor has invested in 13 companies including VoxApp since January this year.
VoxApp will use the money to roll out and scale up the product, which is currently in beta. A part of the funding will also go towards marketing and product deployment, its founder and CEO Madhusudhan told VCCircle.
Founded in December 2012 by Madhusudhan, VoxApp platform enables brands and research companies to undertake consumer feedback for market research on brand awareness, ad recall, etc on the mobile phone. The key problems that VoxApp addresses are inaccuracy in human collection of responses, turnaround time for nationwide data collection and enhancing access to the affluent audience that is increasingly found in gated apartments/offices and out of field surveyor reach, Madhusudhan claimed.
An MBA from IIM Bangalore, Madhusudhan was principal at Pragati India Fund, an India-focused PE fund. He earlier worked with Capital18 and investment bank Lazard.
Currently, when a brand approaches Nielsen for an objective, the market research firm comes up with the research design (what questions to ask, the scales, etc) and then the data are collected by a nationwide network of agents. In contrast, VoxApp consolidates that fragment approach onto a cloud platform by directly sourcing responses from consumers on the mobile.
VoxApp charges a fee from research companies for completed research samples. “We are currently piloting the product with Indian research companies and some brands in the automobile, alcohol space. We have completed our beta testing and are executing pilots with multiple brands,†Madhusudhan said.
Set up early this year, Palaash Ventures is a sector-agnostic investment fund floated by former media industry execs, including Piyush Goyal, an IAN member. It started operations early this year with Delhi as its base and has operations in Bangalore as well. It intends to invest up to $5 million with investment ticket size ranging from Rs 10 lakh to up to Rs 2.5 crore.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)