Influencer Marketing Startup Kofluence Bags $4 Mn From Kunal Shah, Karan Johar

Bengaluru-based influencer marketing startup, Kofluence has raised $4 Mn in Pre-Series A round led by a slew of individual investors.

The round saw participation from Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED), Karan Johar (Filmmaker & TV Personality), Apoorva Mehta (CEO, Dharma Productions), Sujeet Kumar (Cofounder, Udaan), Aprameya Radhakrishna (Cofounder, Koo), Upsparks (Technology VC fund), and Kiran Gadela & Abhijeet Pai.

The startup will use the funding to scale up expansion and accelerate hiring across multiple domains. The investment will also enable the startup to further develop its proprietary platform in a bid to ramp up its presence in the country.

Kofluence also intends to generate multiple product revenue streams from the AI-led proprietary platform, as a part of its future growth strategy.

Kofluence CEO and cofounder, Ritesh Ujjwal said, “Constant alignment and realignment with the market has helped us find the best product-market fit and therefore not only survive but thrive over the last several years. We have a lot of exciting developments in the pipeline to support the creator economy and with the current round, we are excited to fire on all cylinders in an aggressive manner.”

Founded in 2019 by Ritesh Ujjwal and Sreeram Reddy Vanga, Kofluence is an AI-led platform that connects brands with content creators. 

The startup claims to have more than 100K creators onboard and reportedly has a collective reach of over 1.6 Bn through its creator ecosystem.

The startup claims to work with a host of clients from D2C to FinTech. Kofluence has also partnered with major brands such as Jubilant FoodWorks, MPL, Dunzo, Flipkart, PharmaEasy, among others.

Kofluence cofounder Sreeram Reddy Vanga said, “We are confident that the booming creator economy will equip us to scale up our business model and build a self-serve and assisted SaaS platform to become the go-to Martech destination for both brands and creators.”

Echoing the sentiment, Zerodha cofounder and principal investor, Nikhil Kamath said that the startup has expanded its product suite to ensure creators on the platform have varied monetisation avenues to explore.

According to a report by GroupM INCA, the Indian influencer marketing industry was expected to grow to INR 900 Cr by the end of 2021. The report further added that this market was expected to grow to INR 2,200 Cr by 2025, at a CAGR of 25%.

Kofluence competes with other major players in the space namely- Plixxo, OPA, Influencer.in, among others.

This comes barely days after creator tech platform, HYPD, raised $1.5 Mn in its seed funding round. Earlier this month, martech startup, One Impression, also raised $1 Mn in a ‘strategic round’ led by ex-Meta executive Karandeep Anand and sportsperson Neeraj Chopra. 

Add to this, the Good Glamm Group also announced a new influencer marketing venture. Influencer marketing automation platform, Wobb, also raised close to INR $279K in its Pre-Seed round this month.

The creator economy has received a massive boost with the rise of social media platforms including Instagram, Chingari, ShareChat and Moj. Influencer marketing is just playing into that domain offering great services to creators to make parallel revenue streams. The investment brings a renewed cheer to the sector and will spur more growth going forward.