Manch, which is a Vernacular discussion platform has now secured Rs 5 crore which is led by the Stellaris Venture Partners, which shows to have a continuous interest in the startups for the next 500 Million Internet users in India.
The startup which is founded by the Pritam Roy, who is an IIT Bombay Alumni and Hari Sunkari, an alumnus of the Osmania University in 2018. The Manch is building a community-driven platform to react and discuss the news, events, topics with a large number of content to locations and interest groups in the vernacular format.
The startup is going to use the funds to fuel product innovation and to acquire new users.
“People living in small town and cities mostly seek news and content relevant to their interest and – given we are a country of opinions – actively engage in discussions around these topics in their local groups. At Manch, we are focused on understanding this behavior and reimagining the medium which best captures the opinions of these users.” said CEO & co-founder Pritam Roy told in a report.
Manch has a direct competition with the Vokal, which is s social media networking platform founded by the Aprameya R, who is a TaxiForSure founder and is backed by the Accel partners, Bluem Ventures, Shunwei Capital and Kalaari Capital. Moreover, when it comes to acquiring some of the new users, the company has a major competitor that is Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Whatsapp.
“The existing platforms catering to the vernacular audience focus on content consumption use cases and nobody has tried to build a community or discussion platform for local audience. This audience uses chat groups for following their interests (job, jokes, news etc.) but the user experience is broken. We feel that Manch is solving for a huge latent need by creating a discussions platform for the vernacular audience.” said Rahul Chowdhri, partner, Stellaris Venture Partners.
