Yogurt Labs, a mobile video production firm, has raised Rs 72 lakh ($115,190) in convertible notes from a clutch of investors, including Silicon Valley-based angel investor Nick Adams and Kiran Bhat, author of ‘No Holy Cows in Business’, according to a report in The Economics Times. Other investors who participated in the round include Family Pot Investments LLP, a fund set up by two London-based financiers, Devin Kohli and Grant Bergman.
Convertible notes are an investment vehicle used by seed investors who wish to delay establishing a valuation until a later round of funding.
It will use the funds for expanding the business.
The startup was founded in December 2014 by Shardul Mohite, Paramvir Singh, Vivek Parihar and Nishant Shrivastava. Mohite was previously CEO of Webonise Lab, a Pune-based product development company. He had earlier also launched AppBazar, an Android app marketplace (like Google Play store) for India.
Yogurt Labs provides original short video content that is accessible across all mobile platforms. It has developed a do-it-yourself platform for creating videos and building mobile technology that enables anyone to create short videos from their smartphones. It prompts like a director and instructs where to point the camera, how many seconds remain for a shot, etc.
The startup has already made more than 120 videos for 10 customers of which 70 per cent has been paid for. It also allows people to hire filmmakers and students to shoot short video clips for them. The company already has 45 such individual filmmakers and students signed up on its platform.
Other players in the space include Qyuki, a digital media network that had raised $10 million (Rs 65 crore) in funding; Vliv, a mobile video startup that raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Mumbai Angels and a group of executives; Culture Machine, which secured $18 million (Rs 112 crore) in its Series B round of funding from Tiger Global, Zodius Capital and Times Internet Ltd.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)