Karan Johar, Zerodha's Nikhil Kamath invest in influencer marketing platform Kofluence

(Representative image)

Bangalore-based ad-tech influencer marketing platform Kofluence, that has raised $4 million in pre-Series A round, saw participation from notable investors.

The funding round was led by Nikhil Kamath, co-founder of Zerodha and True Beacon.

The round also included Kunal Shah, founder of CRED; director-producer Karan Johar, Apoorva Mehta, CEO of Dharma Productions; Sujeet Kumar who is the co-founder of Udaan; and Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder of Koo.

Other investors included technology venture capitalist fund Upsparks and Kiran Gadela and Abhijeet Pai.

The company intends to use the funds to further develop its proprietary platform, accelerate hiring across multiple geographies and scale up for expansion.

"With influencer marketing spends projected to skyrocket to a whopping $25 billion by 2025, we are confident that the booming creator economy will equip us to scale up our business model and build a self-serve and assisted SAAS platform. We intend on generating multiple product revenue streams out of our AI-led proprietary platform, as a part of our future growth," said Sreeram Reddy Vanga, Founder-Investor, Kofluence.

Founded in 2019, Kofluence has over 100,000 creators onboard and the platform provides a reach of over 1.6 billion through its creator ecosystem. On the brand side, it has partnered with over 25 industries and has worked with brands such as Jubilant FoodWorks, Mobile Premier League, Dunzo, Games24X7, Sugar Cosmetics, Flipkart, PharmaEasy, CoinDCX, BharatPe and Xiaomi India among others.

Ritesh Ujjwal, CEO and Co-Founder, Kofluence said that there are developments in the pipeline to support the creator economy.

“Content creators have long been relied on to capture eyeballs through free user-generated content. But the lack of monetisation tools left a gap, with creators not having the necessary help or infrastructure to make a sustainable living out of their content or creativity. With Kofluence expanding its product suite to encompass creation and monetisation tools, creators on the platform will have varied monetisation avenues to explore," said principal investor Nikhil Kamath.