Influencer marketing ad-tech platform Kofluence on Tuesday said it has racked up pre-Series A funding of $4 million (around Rs 30 crore) led by Zerodha and True Beacon Co-Founder Nikhil Kamath.
The round also saw participation from Kunal Shah (Founder of CRED); Karan Johar (Filmmaker and TV Personality); Apoorva Mehta (CEO of Dharma Productions); Sujeet Kumar (Co-Founder of Udaan); Aprameya Radhakrishna (Co-Founder of Koo); micro vc fund Upsparks as well as investors Kiran Gadela and Abhijeet Pai.
The Bengaluru-based company plans to use the fresh funds to further develop its proprietary platform, boost hiring and scale up for expansion.
Founded by Ritesh Ujjwal and Sreeram Reddy Vanga, Kofluence claims to connect brands with content creators and has over 100,000 creators on board till date.
The company works with brands like Jubilant FoodWorks (Domino’s, ChefBoss), MPL, Dunzo, Games24X7, Sugar Cosmetics, Flipkart, PharmaEasy, Dhani, CoinDCX, Zoomcar, BharatPe and Xiaomi India, among others.
“Content creators have long been relied on to capture eyeballs through free user-generated content. But the lack of monetization tools left a gap, with creators not having the necessary help or infrastructure to make a sustainable living out of their content or creativity.
With Kofluence expanding its product suite to encompass creation and monetization tools, creators on the platform will have varied monetization avenues to explore," Nikhil Kamath said.
"With influencer marketing spends projected to skyrocket to a whopping $25 billion by 2025, we are confident that the booming creator economy will equip us to scale up our business model and build a self-serve and assisted SaaS platform to become the go-to martech destination for both brands and creators,” said Sreeram Reddy Vanga, Founder-Investor, Kofluence.
Earlier, Ujjwal had worked with InnoPark, Axis Bank, Prashaste Education while Sreeram Reddy Vanga is a serial who is also the founder of InnoPark, venture firm Hustle Partners, according to their Linkedin profiles.
Mohamad Faraz Founding Partner at Upsparks said that startups have boosted their budgets of customer acquisition and Kofluence is well-positioned to power social campaigns for brands, helping them with innovative acquisition strategies.