Social Media Platform Hunch Bags $23 Mn To Expand Footprint In India

Social media platform Hunch has secured $23 Mn in its Series A funding round led by Alpha Wave. The round also saw participation from South Korea-based venture capital (VC) firm Hashed Emergent and others.

The fresh proceeds will be deployed to further expand the platform’s footprint in India, scale up operations in the country and enhance its tech stack.

Founded in 2022 by Ish Goel, Nitika Goel and Kartic Rakhra, Hunch operates an anonymous polling platform which allows users to vote and interact with each other. 

“I’m thrilled to have new funding especially at a time when Hunch is scaling across US and India. We believe Hunch has achieved PMF, and this is a good time to celebrate this news with the community,” said Hunch cofounder and CEO Ish Goel.

Commenting on the announcement, Hashed Emergent’s managing partner and CEO Tak Lee said, “Crowd-sourced intelligence is a big area of innovation both in the Web3 and Web2 worlds, and many attempts have been made to build a platform that brings out structured crowd intelligence. We feel Hunch has the ability to build on the best of both worlds and emerge as the preferred platform for opinionated individuals.”

Hunch last raised a seed capital of $3 Mn in December 2022. 

The startup claims to have generated more than 1.15 Lakh polls since inception and claims to host more than 1 Mn users across 22 cities in India. Ish Goel reportedly said that 85% of Hunch’s user base comes from India. 

While Hunch specifically caters to polling, it competes globally with the likes of social media giants such as Meta and X which also offer users the option to conduct polls across a gamut of their offerings, including WhatsApp, Threads, and Instagram.

The Dubai-based startup is looking to capitalise on the mushrooming Indian social media space. India remains as one of the largest social media markets, even though only a little over 41% of its population is on social media platforms. 

According to Mordor Intelligence, the global social networking market is expected to grow to a size of $153.06 Bn by 2028.

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