New age content platform Social Swag, which is a collective brainchild of Akshay Kumar, Rana Daggubati Collective Artists and Mahesh Bhupathi has announced raising $3.5 million in a Pre Series A round. The round has been led by IMEF and Unicorn India Ventures, which has made its maiden announcement in a content creator economy specialist platform.
Some other HNI’s who participated in the round are Vinay Agarwal, Ritesh Deshmukh, Raghu Subramanian, Edward Menezes, The Shekama Family Trust, and The Blume Founders fund.
Started in 2020, Social Swag is building out a Celebrity/ influencer commerce platform and has been growing 40% m-o-m for the last 5 months and is poised to continue this trajectory as the online story in India continues to generate exciting outcomes.
Parth Gandhi who launched IMEF as an entertainment fund says, “We are backing various entertainment opportunities in India and with Social Swag’s offering across multiple products we believe they will become an outlier in the space. That is why we chose them as our first investment.”
Bhaskar Majumdar, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures, says, “As a fund, we strongly believe that the content creator economy is ripe for explosive growth. We have been tracking Social Swag for close to 6 months now and are very bullish on the moat they have been able to create vis-a-vis access to talent and building technology to make it accessible. We are excited to back them in their journey.”
Social Swag has multiple verticals of its offering like Masterclasses, Live learning and personal shout outs etc. The Company runs on a subscription model giving unlimited access to the curated content on the platform. Top celebrities and achievers like Lara Dutta, Bhavish Aggarwal, Abhinav Bindra, Akshay Kumar, Vicky Ratnani, Avinash Gowarikar are some of the most reputed names whose masterclasses are currently running on the platform. Social Swag aspires to build the biggest content platform which is made in India for the world.
Rana Daggubatti, an accomplished actor, entrepreneur & Co founder, Social Swag, says, “We are excited to welcome our new investors and our focus will remain to create a platform where various people will find relevant content for themselves across different products. These would be a mix of entertainment, self development, skill enhancement and passion content.”
According to a recent industry report, there are over 1,50,000 professional content creators in India who are able to monetize their services. The global content creators’ economy is estimated to be over $100 billion. Social Swag is rightly positioned to build its market leadership as the platform is backed by some of the most accomplished content creators and artists in India.
SNK Advisors advised Social Swag on the transaction.
About Unicorn India Ventures
Unicorn India Ventures is a Mumbai-based early stage fund house started in 2015 by Anil Joshi and Bhaskar Majumdar. The Fund has also launched a UK India cross border fund for funding UK startups looking to enter India. From its first Fund, UIV has invested in 18 companies like Inc42, Sequretek, Pharmarack, Genrobotics, NeuroEquilibrium, SmartCoin, Open Bank, Open app to name a few. Unicorn India has also announced Fund II, which is a Rs 300 crore fund launch
ed in 2019 which has invested in 15 companies so far.
About IMEF
IMEF (India Media & Entertainment Fund) is India’s first AIF focused on investing in Media, Entertainment and Technology Industry. IMEF invests in Credit, Special Situations and Equity opportunities across a wide array of Media & Entertainment businesses, including filmed entertainment, events, media, gaming and technology. IMEF is founded by Parth Gandhi and Systematix Group (a diversified financial services company).