Headfone, an audio OTT (over-the-top) platform said Tuesday it has raised $10 million (around Rs 76 crore) in a Series B funding round led by early-stage venture capital firm Elevation Capital.
Elevation Capital recently announced its eighth pool of capital of $670 million in April 2022 and has invested in companies across consumer internet, SaaS, fintech, consumer brands, edtech, health tech and Web3/crypto, and has offices in Bengaluru, Gurugram and Salt Lake City.
Headfone had raised $3 million (around Rs 22 crore) in its Series A funding round in January last year led by South Korean-based venture capital firm Hashed and SoftBank Ventures Asia-backed Radish app’s founder Seung Yoon Lee.
The Bengaluru-based start-up, operated by Diacoustic Labs says it will use the funds to diversify content offerings across languages and expand across genres. Headfone currently offers content in Hindi.
Headfone was founded in 2017 by former Meta (erstwhile Facebook) employees Prateem Khandelwal and Yogesh Sharma. The app primarily focusses on offering audio drama in fictional genres such as horror, suspense, romance, among others.
Apart from Hashed, Headfone’s series B funding round saw participation from angel investors like Hotstar Founding CEO, Ajit Mohan, stand-up artist, Biswa Kalyan Rath & Anshumani Ruddra, Group PM at Google.
“Popular fiction genres like horror, fantasy and thriller are expensive to create and difficult to get right in video format whereas the same genres can be quickly produced in audio drama format, and still give an immersive and imaginative experience to listeners,” Pratham Khandelwal, CEO of Headfone said.
Currently, Headfone has 3 million monthly active users with 52 minutes as the average daily time spent per active user on the app. There are 800,000 content pieces on the platform, which have been growing at a 10% CMGR (compound monthly growth rate).
“Audio dramas, so far, have been created by bringing together multiple artists in the same physical studio and this makes it an expensive and time-consuming process. But what we have built is a decentralised online platform where multiple artists, writers, voice actors and sound engineers collaborate to create content in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner,” Yogesh Sharma, chief technical officer at Headfone added.
