Blog

Rigi, a community monetisation and management platform for content creators and influencers, has raised Rs 100 crore (approximately $12.25 million) in a fresh round of funding led by Elevation Capital. Returning investors Accel, Stellaris and Sequoia also participated in the extension to the Series A round. 

The round also saw participation from new angel investors including cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni, CRED Founder Kunal Shah, NoBroker Founder Amit Agarwal, Country Delight Founder Chakradhar Gade, and finance content creator Sharan Hegde, among others. 

With the current round, Rigi has raised a total of $25 million across three rounds of funding. It had last raised $10 million in April 2022 in a Series A round of funding. 

With the fresh capital, the startup plans on expanding to new categories of content and geographies. Currently, it focuses on gaming, skill training, health, and fitness, and launched in Indonesia three months ago. 

Rigi offers a bundle of tools including subscription management, paid workshops, live one-to-one classes, and integration with platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp. 

“Generation one platforms like YouTube, Twitter etc have done their job well by giving a distribution platform to creators. Platforms like Rigi will help these creators monetise their distribution. We are not focused on more users or business,” Swapnil Saurav, Co-founder of Rigi, told YourStory. 

Rigi was founded in 2021 by Swapnil Saurav and Ananya Singhal, who sold their fantasy sports platform HalaPlay to Nazara Technologies and Delta Corp in 2020. 

Rigi charges the content creators a commission on the course fee. The courses include webinars—pre-recorded as well as live content—with 60% of the content on the platform being recorded which is hosted on Rigi’s servers and is available to paying users. The platform typically works with creators who have over 50,000 followers on Instagram or YouTube. 

Mayank Khanduja, Partner at Elevation Capital, told YourStory that the investment was a part of the fund’s thesis to invest in the creator economy.

“We have been making investments in this space before it was called creator economy with ShareChat. We have invested in live streaming app Turnip for gamers and creators, dating and audio game app FRND, arts and sports focused learning and community platform FrontRow, and beauty-focused platform for live classes Airblack,” he said. 

Mayank added that the fund will continue to invest in the space for demand generation, business tools, and allied services for the creator economy. 

The space also has competition from education-focused platforms for content monetisation including Teachmint and Unacademy-owned Graphy.