Slick Bags Funding For Building GenZ Focussed Social Networking Platform

Social networking startup Slick has raised $1.6 Mn in a seed funding round led by WEH Ventures. The round also saw participation from iSeed Ventures, All In Capital, existing investor Titan Capital, along with Sumit Gupta (Coin CDX Founder and CEO), Subh Malhotra (MPL cofounder), Ashutosh Valani and Priyank Shah (cofounders of Renee), Vivek Sinha (COO Unacademy), Amit Kumar (cofounder and CEO NoBroker), Abhishek Goyal  (cofounder Tracxn), Rohith Bhat (CEO 99Games), Arjun Viadya (cofounder V3 Ventures), and Ankit Agarwal (Partner Alteria Capital).

Slick said that the funds will be used to enhance Slick’s user experience, drive innovation, and develop cutting-edge features to attract more users.

The Bengaluru-based startup primarily focuses on GenZ and aims to become an ultimate platform to discover social connections through innovative features. Further, Slick is focusing on offering a new platform by eliminating the old digital ecosystem that has been saturated by the rise of passive media and diluted the actual purpose of social media, that is to create connections. 

Last year, Slick raised $500K in a pre-seed round led by Unacademy founders Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh and other angel investors including Kunal Shah, Sujeet Kumar, and early-stage VCs, Titan Capital, and Blume Founders Fund.

Commenting on the investment, Slick’s CTO, Rachit Bansal said, “Today’s generation hasn’t seen that side of social networks where Insta used to be more about photo sharing with friends and you could ‘poke’ friends on Facebook.” 

Adding to it, Slick CEO, Archit Nanda said, “One of the fundamental problems seen with today’s social networks is their business model of ads, which dilutes networking and shifts users’ focus to consuming content. These platforms ultimately want more timeshare from their users, in ways that are not networking, which defies the very idea of a social network.”

Founded in 2022 by former Unacademy executive Archit Nanda, Slick claims to have onboarded more than 1 Mn users across 5000+ schools and colleges in India. However, earlier this year, it fell prey to a data breach incident leading to exposure of sensitive information of primarily school-going children. This security lapse led to a leakage of data of about 153K users since December 11, containing full names, mobile numbers, dates of birth, and profile pictures of Slick users, those were left open without a password.

According to a Statista report, total revenue of social media in India is expected to grow annually by 4.75% CAGR by 2027, resulting in a projected market volume of $1.12 Bn by 2027.

Being a country with the largest population in the world, India is a competitive market for social media and other consumer internet platforms. However, competing with giants such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc may not be as easy as it may sound. 

Amid the funding crunch and macroeconomic slowdown, some social media startups operating in India have faced major challenges. Last year, Indian microblogging platform Koo laid off about 5% of its workforce who were majorly working in Delhi and other north India offices. 

Two other startups in the consumer internet space, Sharechat and Moj laid off 500 employees, or about 20% of its staff, earlier this year. 

On the other hand, gross advertisement revenues of Facebook India Online Services were reported at INR 16,189 Cr in financial year 2021-22 (FY22), up 74% year-on-year (YoY) from INR 9,326 Cr in FY21.