Local lifestyle content and discovery platform NearFox has raised an undisclosed amount in an angel round where investors valued the bootstrapped venture at Rs 12.5 crore.
The round was led by Globevestor Angel Fund and a clutch of other investors including Devendra Rane, CTO at CoverFox, Ravi Jain, Co-Founder of GenY Medium, and Arpan Nagdeve, Vice-President, products, at Craftsvilla.
NearFox, which features hyperlocal and city news, city-wide events and a discussion platform for neighbour interaction, will use the proceeds to expand its team and enter more geographies.
Kiran Patil, Co-Founder & CEO of NearFox, said the startup seeks to solve the massive information asymmetry that exists in the local lifestyle segment.
The startup is currently operational in Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai, and plans to launch in New York next. “We are starting with New York so that we have some time to understand the US market, before we aggressively launch there,” Patil said. “We aim to make US our core market & India our secondary market in the future.”
Following a six-fold growth in website traffic over the last six months, NearFox currently gets 2.5 lakh visits per month. The company claims that it’s completely organic, without any marketing spend. NearFox also boasts of low operational costs through efficient use of technology, digital media and user-generated content.
Ankur Shrivastava, Co-Founder at Globevestor, said, “A huge untapped opportunity exists in the localisation and personalisation of content, especially on local news and discovery. NearFox aims to be at the forefront of this and has assembled an ‘A team’ very quickly.”
He expressed confidence on NearFox’s ability to deliver as he believes they are the go-to people for content marketing and growth hacking.
NearFox aims to be live in 10 Indian cities by mid-2017, and hopes to launch in 200 cities globally over the next three years, through an expansion led by an extensive blogger network and sharp focus on user-generated content.
Source: Economic Times
