India’s Most Viral Content Marketing Site WittyFeed Raises Pre Series A Funding From Anand Chandrasekaran, Others

Content marketing platform WittyFeed has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a Pre Series A round from a group of  marquee investors including Anand Chandrasekaran, former Snapdeal CPO; Apurva Chamaria, VP & Head Corporate Marketing , HCL Technologies; Ritesh Malik, co-founder, Innov8; Ashish Toshniwal , CEO, Y Media Labs; angel investor Ajeet Khurana; Aneil Mahajan, Ex COO, Bhaskar Group; Piyush Goel , founder and CEO Beyond Key Systems; Singapore Angel Network, and Harsh Mani Tripathi, founder Pyoopil Education Technologies.

The company plans to use the proceeds to strengthen its technology infrastructure, enhance its distribution platform, as well as for augmenting its product portfolio. The funding will also be used for the expansion of its sales team to dive deep into the content-driven platforms and video making for brands while exploring other domains as well.

Vinay Singhal, CEO & co-founder, WittyFeed said “WittyFeed is on path to become the world’s largest viral content marketing platform where brands share their stories with their consumers and the distribution is taken care of by WittyFeed’s AI-driven platform. We are delighted to receive great mentorship from Anand Chandrasekaran and other individual investors as investors, mentors and advisors.”

Founded in September 2014 by Parveen Singhal, Vinay Singhal and Shashank Vaishnav, the Indore headquartered WittyFeed has reached from 0 to 250 Mn pageviews per month in a short span of three years. It claims to have an audience reach of more than 1 Bn and gets 80 Mn unique readers and 160 Mn video views every month.

The Content Marketing Startup Valued At $45 Mn

In a previous interaction with Inc42, WittyFeed had shared that the site is listed under the Top 40 websites in India on Alexa rankings, while it stands under the Top 300 websites globally. The startup also claims to be India’s largest viral content marketing company and reaching revenues of about $7.04 Mn (INR 45 Cr) this year. Recent Alexa ranking globally stands at 405.

Apurva Chamaria, VP & Head of Corporate Marketing, HCL added, “According to a Group M report released in February, advertising spent on digital media channels is expected to grow 30% to $1.48 Bn (INR 9,490 Cr) in 2017. With advertising spends shifting more and more to social & digital mediums, especially towards content & videos, WittyFeed is uniquely placed to attain huge interest from brands and their custodians.”

WittyFeed is also looking to expand further in the US market as it contributes 30% of company’s traffic. Some of the brands which rely on the content marketing startup’s viral capabilities are Zee Network, Tinder, Panasonic, Havmore Icecreams, ITM University, Hyundai, Coke, JIO, Dainik Bhsakar, V Resorts, Burger King, Dunkin Donuts, Droom, Lakeland, Exide life insurance and Career Launcher, among 50 others. Indian platforms such as ScoopWhoop, FilterCopy also compete in the same space as WittyFeed. This year, another digital media platform POPxo which is focused on women has closed a $3.1 Mn round of funding. As per an EY January 2016 report, the digital content consumption market in India has been poised to reach $3.1 Bn (INR 20,000 Cr) by 2020.

Update 1: 2nd November 2017

Wittyfeed’s valuation has been updated to $45 Mn from $100 Mn.