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Mumbai-based NearFox, a local lifestyle content and discovery platform, has recently raised an undisclosed amount from Globevestor Angel Fund, CoverFox CTO Devendra Rane, GenY Medium co-founder Ravi Jain, and Craftsvilla Product VP Arpan Nagdeve, among others.
The startup will utilise the funds for expanding the team and launching operations in more geographies.
Ankur Shrivastava, co-founder at Globevestor, said: “A huge untapped opportunity exists in the localisation and personalisation of content, especially on local news and discovery. NearFox aims to be at the forefront of this and has assembled an ‘A team’ very quickly. We’ve known them for a long time as the go-to people for content marketing and growth hacking, and they’re easily the best team to deliver on this vision.”
NearFox was founded in 2015 by IIT-Bombay Alumni, Kiran Patil and Pritesh Mittal. NearFox lets the users discover and explore what is happening in their city, in food, shopping, beauty, fashion, fitness, entertainment and local travel. The startup is currently operational in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai.
“While users are looking for what’s happening in the city, businesses are going to the extent of distributing pamphlets with the morning paper to reach out to them. NearFox aims to solve this massive information asymmetry that exists in the local lifestyle segment,” said Kiran.
Following six-fold growth in website traffic over the last six months, NearFox currently claims to have 2.5 lakh visits per month. The company claims these visits to be completely organic, without any marketing spend.
NearFox plans to be live in 10 cities by mid-2017, and aims to launch in 200 cities globally over three years, through expansion led by an extensive blogger network and sharp focus on user-generated content, according to an official statement
Other startups in the vertical are doing well too. In March 2016, Delhi-based social discovery app, Shouut, raised $500K in an angel round of funding from an undisclosed high-net-worth individual in India. In February 2016, Gurgaon-based hyperlocal discovery platform, Magicpin, raised $3 Mn in Series A round of funding from existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other players in this segment include Klip.in, Little, Smytten, and Little Black Book Delhi.
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