Seekho raises $28 million funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners

Seekho

Edutainment video platform Seekho announced on September 3 that it has secured $28 million in Series B funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners to build new interactive content formats and invest in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered learning experiences.

Goodwater Capital and existing investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Elevation Capital also participated in the funding round. This brings Seekho's total funding to about $40 million, which includes an $8 million round in December 2024.

Founded in 2020 by Rohit Choudhary, Keertay Agarwal, and Yash Banwani, Seekho offers bite-sized regional learning content designed to provide consumers with practical knowledge that can help with their career development and personal growth.

The videos, typically 3 to 5 minutes long, cover categories such as business, finance, technology, and digital services, among others. This includes getting guidance on availing digital services, growing their Instagram and YouTube presence, improving their business operations, language learning, and self-help, among others.

Users can access the content through a monthly subscription of Rs 149 on the web or Rs 199 on Android, which provides ad-free access to over 10,000 videos.

Seekho offers content in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu, with the latter two added in the past quarter. It now plans to add Kannada and Bangla soon, with support for additional languages expected over the next couple of quarters, Choudhary told Moneycontrol.

He added that Seekho works with a few hundred creators through exclusive contracts to generate videos through a content commissioning model.

AI to help Seekho's expansion plans

The fundraise comes amid rapid growth at the Bengaluru-based startup, driven by Indian consumers’ willingness to pay for content and the rising adoption of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) autopay, which has brought millions of Indians into the subscription economy.

The startup says it currently has 25 million monthly active users, registering a 60 percent growth on a quarterly basis. Choudhary added that Seekho has also been witnessing 60 percent revenue growth quarterly for almost three years, but did not disclose specific numbers.

He said, "The mission of Seekho is to make learning fun and easy for everyone, and the goal is to make it a global brand. We will be moving very fast on that."

AI is expected to play a key role in this expansion, and the company is making significant investments on this front, Choudhary said.

"With the use of AI, we will create more interactive learning formats, through which people can not just learn from the videos, but also use Seekho as a personalised mentor to achieve what they want faster. That will eventually help us make Seekho a global brand," he said.

For instance, if someone wants to start a business and is watching videos about various business ideas and processes, they should be able to ask Seekho specific questions about their use case and receive clear answers, Choudhary explained. "These AI-blended experiences are what we are trying to build to further enhance our offering," he added.

That said, Choudhary said Seekho has no plans to leverage AI in the content creation process.

"We are definitely using AI to increase the productivity of creators. However, we are not replacing their insights with AI, because that would defeat the purpose. People come to Seekho for the practical, in-depth insights provided directly by experts, and AI is not yet capable of delivering those," he said.

Anant Vidur Puri, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said that Seekho's unique advantage comes from the fact that they are a horizontal platform and serve a heterogeneous group of users.

"While many content platforms in India have been created that provide entertainment, I think Seekho is one of the few that educates as well and has created this interesting edutainment category. It's not just entertainment, but also an avenue for personal and career growth in an actionable manner," he said.

Puri added, "The trifecta of 800 million+ smartphone users in India, each spending 7-8 hours a day, and frictionless online payments means that almost all aspects of life have moved to digital platforms - from buying groceries to financial transactions and now, with Seekho, education as well."