PayTunes, a mobile advertising platform, has raised $500,000 in its seed funding round from Indian Angel Network, along with the participation of existing investors – CIO Angel Network, Apurva Parekh and Sanjay Mehta.
On behalf of IAN, Vishal Khare and Rajeev Arora have led the investment round. As a part of the deal, both of them will now join the company board. They will also act as a mentor for the team.
This investment from Indian Angel Network (IAN) marks the 16th investment from the angel investor group this year. Recently, it invested in Toko Innovation Studios, Unbxd, Little Black Book, 6Degree, etc.
The company is now planning to utilize the investment for further expanding its team and hiring more talent in the sales department and for marketing initiatives.
PayTunes was founded in July 2015 by Divya Pratap Singh and Rakesh Sehgal. Last year, in September 2015, the company had raised $100,000 from CIO Angel Network.
The startup provides advertisers and brands a targeted medium to reach mobile consumers through audio visual ads. It replaces mobile ringtones with ad jingles from advertisers and at the end of a call, displays visuals as an advertisement. For every ad played, users earns points which can later be redeemed in terms of mobile recharges and bill payments.
For advertisers, the company is providing a complete advertisement platform with in-build ad analytics. Advertisers can choose the users they want to target based on geography, demography and other parameters and push their ad from the platform’s back-end dashboard through a single click.
The company claims that its mobile app has seen over 4 lakh downloads and has strong foothold in regions like Delhi-NCR, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Mumbai, Pune, Rajasthan and Bihar.
Vishal Khare, who invested in the current round, said,
Paytunes is building an alternative medium in the branding domain. While most of the consumption of these mediums is offline, all of these are trying to move to mobile to improve the user engagement and user mindspace. It presents a great opportunity for brands to reach mobile consumers extensively.
An e-Marketer report suggests that the digital advertising expenditure in India is currently around $1 billion, out of which mobile advertising accounts for $0.18 billion. It further suggests that by the end of year 2019, the digital ad expenditure is expected to grow to $2.17 billion and mobile advertising to $1.23 billion.
