Crowdfunding is picking up pace in India, and platforms facilitating are rising up fast. One such platform Ketto, which is a Mumbai-based crowdfunding platform for social, personal and creative projects has raised about $700K in a fresh funding round led by Pradyumna Dalmia of Culcatta Angels and Sudhir Rao of The Chennai Angels.
Along with them, other investors have also participated in this funding round, including Singapore angel network, Anupam Mittal, Indian Internet Fund, Letsventure, Chennai Angels, Calcutta Angels, Intellecap Impact Investment Network (I3N),Ah Ventures, & Project Guerrilla.
Founded in October 2012 by Bollywood actor Kunal Kapoor along with Varun Sheth and Zaheer Adenwala, Ketto claims to be Asia’s largest crowdfunding platform for social, personal and creative projects. Previously, in 2013, the company had raised about $121K in angel funding round from ah! Ventures and Calcutta Angels.
With the capital raised in this round, Ketto is now planning to expand its team, which currently includes 10 members in technology and business development. It will now expand its services to overseas countries, including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and other South-East Asian countries.
With over 500 campaigns being funded on the platform and having success rate of a whooping 70%, the company is now aiming to cross the milestone of reaching $100 million in volumes through crowdfunding.
The company has also received attention from many celebrities and corporate. In fact, a few of them have also shown their support by backing projects on the portal. These include the likes of Hritik Roshan, Amitabh Bachchan (whose family invested in a Singapore based startup in personal capacity), Anuskha Sharma, Myntra and StarSports among others.
Varun Sheth, Co-founder & CEO, Ketto said,
The fresh round of funds will be used to build a world class platform which will facilitate users to raise funds across multiple categories for any project of their choice.
Pradyumna Dalmia Co-founder, Calcutta Angels said,
We were one of the first investors in Ketto and have been closely associated with Ketto team since the last 18 months. During this time the company has shown exceptional progress and grown at a lightning speed with a very tight burn rate and a zero advertising cost. With the new fund infusion, I have full confidence that Ketto will be among the top 10 global crowdfunding platforms.
While the global crowdfunding market is estimated to reach $96 billion by 2025, India currently isn;t considered the most active country when it comes to crowd-sourcing funds.
Ketto appears to have potential to get maximum support. Currently, it claims to be growing at a 3000% year-on-year basis in terms of their transactions. In the past few months, the company has been crowdfunding close to a crore monthly.
