Chris Gayle, a West Indies-based cricketer, seems to have set his eyes on Indian startups for investments. After investing in IONA — a Bangalore-based entertainment company, he has now invested in augmented reality (AR) start-up FlippAR for a minority stake.
Chris Gayle will also join the company’s board and promote its products as brand ambassador. The company declined to reveal the size of the investment.
The money raised will be used to acquire new customers and for product development. Vivek Jain, founder of the company, said,
We will focus on user acquisition and retention as our lead KPI (Key Performance Indicator) and not revenue targets.
The company also plans to expand its business into the West Indies tourism market in the next year. This is where Chris Gayle could come in handy. The startup’s main target are millennials and users aged between 17 and 24 years.
FlipAR was founded in late 2015 by Vivek M. Jain. Inspired from AR games like Pokemon Go, the app allows users to tag a location, building, cafes, restaurants, etc. and save images/videos as ‘Stories’.
When ‘Stories’ are shared with the public list, other users will be able to see the images when they point their phone screen at the location. Apart from this, the start-up also has ‘experiences’ set up in different locations in Bengaluru.
The company has clients like Thomson Reuters, Amnesty International, Bangalore Comicon, NGMA Art Gallery, DNA Networks, among others.
In India, the startup competes with other start-ups like Tesseract Inc, Merxius, Imaginate, ShilpMIS among others. It also competes with bigger companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple as they already have their own AR and VR platforms.
Many India cricketers, such as Sourav Ganguly, Virat Kohli, Robin Uthappa, Sachin Tendulkar, among others, have invested in startups. Yuvraj Singh has gone a step ahead and launched his own venture capital firm — YouWeCan Ventures.