NearFox, a local lifestyle content discovery platform, today announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in its seed round. The funding comes from Globevestor Angel Fund, CoverFox CTO Devendra Rane, GenY Medium Co-founder and Ex-Principal of Ventureast Ravi Jain and Craftsvilla Products VP Arpan Nagdeve, among others.
With the infusion of new capital in the company, NearFox plans to expand its team. It will also spend significant amount to augment its operations to other geographies. The company claims that so far it has been able to keep operational costs low through efficient use of technology, digital media and user-generated content. It plans to expand its operations to around 10 cities by mid-2017, and aims to launch in 200 cities globally over three years, through expansion led by an extensive blogger network and sharp focus on user-generated content.
Founded by Kiran Patil and Pritesh Mittal in 2015, NearFox brings to users the best in the city in food, shopping, beauty, fashion, fitness, entertainment and local travel. It is currently operational in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai, and plans to launch in New York next. Commenting on the same Kiran Patil, co-founder of the company, said,
While users are looking for what’s happening in the city, businesses are going to the extent of distributing pamphlets with the morning paper to reach out to them. NearFox aims to solve this massive information asymmetry that exists in the local lifestyle segment.
NearFox claims to have achieved 6-fold growth in website traffic over the last six months. It currently gets 2.5 lakh visits per month, which, as per the company, are completely organic, without any marketing spend. Ankur Shrivastava, Co-founder at Globevestor, said,
A huge untapped opportunity exists in the localization and personalization 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. We’ve known them for a long time as the go-to people for content marketing and growth hacking, and they’re easily the best team to deliver on this vision.
