NearGroup, which enables users to discover people through chat, has secured ₹10 crore in its seed funding round. The round was led by VC firm OpenOcean, along with the participation from Neotribe and BoostVC.
The company is focusing on the Indian market, after seeing tracking in the United States, Philippines and Vietnam. As per the company, it already has over 34 lakh users, and is claiming to get around 5 lakh to 6 lakh users every month.
To establish its presence in India, the company has reportedly hired an India-specific marketing team of six so far. It is planning to keep expanding its team in India as it moves forward. The firm has already tested this India-specific feature among 15,000 users and claims to have seen a spike in usage.
Prashant Pitti, CEO of NearGroup, said,
There is a social stigma which comes upon using a dating app and women do not wish to have an open dating profile which both their friends and relatives can see, so when aguy makes his profile on NearGroup messenger, his interests and thoughts can be viewed by women for them to send a chat request to, but the woman’s profile details can’t be viewed by guys, it is sort of a swayamvar for women.
While Neargroup started as a bot-based service to connect people with similar interests in the same neighborhood, the online chat feature has overtaken the initial proposition, leading the company to move away from it.
NearGroup is basically a social dating product and a chatbot on Facebook Messenger. It focuses on being an alternative to Tinder’s image-swiping culture.