Akshay Kumar and Rana Daggubati promoted content platform Social Swag has raised $3.5 Mn in a Pre-Series A funding round led by IMEF and Unicorn India Ventures.
Vinay Agarwal, Ritesh Deskmukh, Raghu Subramanian, Edward Menezes, The Shekama Family Trust, and The Blume Founders fund also participated in the round with other HNIs and angel investors.
Founded in 2020 as the brainchild of Akshay Kumar, Rana Daggubati Collective Artists and Mahesh Bhupathi, Social Swag is building a celebrity and influencer commerce platform which it claims has been growing at a 40% month-on-month rate for the last five months.
It offers multiple products including masterclasses, non-fungible tokens (NFT), live learning sessions and personal shoutouts from celebrities. Some of the celebrities and influencers on its platform include Lara Dutta, Bhavish Aggarwal, Abhinav Bindra, Akshay Kumar, Vicky Ratnani, and Avinash Gowarikar.
“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,” said Bhaskar Majumdar, managing partner at Unicorn India Ventures.
Earlier this month, official NFTs of the movie 83 worth INR 10 lakh were sold in just one hour on the Social Swag’s NFT platform.
The NFTs minted on the Polygon blockchain were packaged into the following collections:
- Prestige Collection: This collection featured 16 single-copy asset-backed NFTs of pivotal scenes in the movie bundled with autographed physical cricket memorabilia from the movie
- For Your Eyes Only Collection: This featured a set of five certified authentic shots that didn’t make the cut in the final cut of 83.
- Taste of Success Collection: This collection consisted of 20 illustrated digital avatars created by artists Vidhushi and Medhavini Yadav, in collaboration with animator Ashwin Vasudevan and sound artist Anupama Thakur
According to Chainalysis, users sent at least $44.2 Bn worth of cryptocurrency to ERC-721 and ERC-1155 contracts in 2021. These are the two types of Ethereum smart contracts associated with NFT marketplaces and collections.
“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,” said Rana Daggubatti, accomplished Telugu actor and cofounder of Social Swag.
The Indian influencer market was valued to be worth between $75 Mn and $150 Mn last year. The global market, in comparison, is valued to be worth over $100 Bn. Globally, more than $800 Mn in venture capital has been invested into the creator economy since October 2020.
Earlier this week, HYPD had raised $1.5 Mn in seed funding from Better Capital, Sauce VC and others to build Shopify for creators. Influencers Bhuvan Bam, Tanmay Bhat, Ranveer Allahbadia, and Dhvani Bhanushali also invested in the round as angel investors along with CXOs of unicorn companies.
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