Indian Language Video Platform Bolo Raises INR 3 Cr

Bengaluru based Indian language knowledge sharing community Bolo has raised INR 3 Cr in seed funding led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from Unacademy founders Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh, Growth Story founders Ganesh Krishnan and Srinivas Anumolu and Newsdog founder Chen Yukun. The release stated that this funding will be used to strengthen the team across product, technology and operations.

Bolo, launched in July 2018, is a knowledge-sharing community that allows users to ask and answer questions in Hindi. The answers are in the form of short videos of less than 1 minute each. Additionally, users can directly get on video call with experts on the platform for a small fee to get highly personalised solutions to their problems. The app is currently available in Hindi language.

“We believe India is at an inflection point due to the rapid adoption of internet and payment infrastructure. We aim to enable knowledge sharing among Indians coming online for the first time in a format they prefer and the language that they’re comfortable with,” said Nishant Chandra, cofounder.

Chandra said that Bolo has partnered with investors who have a deep understanding of the content ecosystem of India and China and their experience of building and scaling consumer internet platforms would add tremendous value in our journey.

Pratik Poddar from Nexus Venture Partners said that the company continues to be bullish on the Indian language consumption story. It has seen a shift in the behaviour pattern — people were searching on YouTube for information as some would on Google, and now looking for information in video format which is trustworthy and easy to consume.

“There is a lack of supply of structured content and discoverability is a problem…we are together imagining the creation of the largest information community of India here — primarily in lifestyle categories — and are proud to be partners,” Pratik added.

Bolo recently launched a feature where people can consult experts over video call, which is said would allow them to onboard the topmost experts on the platform because this provides them an avenue to generate income. They, in turn, are expected to create high quality, long shelf life content on the platform driving engagement further.

“We are finding that Indians are highly aspirational and willing to pay to get personalised solutions to their problems,” said Siddharth Maheshwari, co-Founder, Bolo.

400 million Indians have used internet over the last 4 years. Indian language users will make more than 75% of the total users will be Indian language users by 2021. Apps focussing on utility, entertainment and news already serve millions of people and knowledge sharing communities like Bolo are rising rapidly as people start looking for information.

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