MyScoot, a Gurugram-based community platform for home-hosted experiences, has raised $1.7 million (₹11.7 crore) in a round of seed funding from Lightspeed India Partners, Venture Highway, and Mayfield India. While, Kunal Shah, CEO of CRED, and Maninder Gulati, Chief Strategy Officer at OYO Rooms also participated in the round.
The platform plans to use the funds to hire its core team, recruit tech talent and more deeply penetrate their current market.
The company said that the funding will help MyScoot build AI-based social experience recommendations, develop its safe-guards, and establish a stronghold in their already active Delhi and Bengaluru market.
“Our goal is to reach more of the world’s largest youth cohort, Indian millennials, enabling them to create bonds and build friendships in a new and meaningful way,” Suyash Sinha, CEO and co-founder, MyScoot said.
MyScoot was founded by Suyash Sinha, Sidharth Rawat, Akhil Tripathi, and Somvir Yadav in 2018. However, in 2017, they started MyScoot in beta version and marked 500 registrations within days. It is a platform verified individuals use to attend home-hosted social events with other members.
There is a five step verification process after which user are ‘host’ or ‘book’. The host sets the price point for their offering and earns money as they select guests to attend. Built to establish real connections, MyScoot offers bold, fresh, experiences and parties of all kinds from dinner parties, board game brunches, Salsa dance socials, to backyard bonfires.
Interestingly, till date, the startup has completed 2,000 bookings with 200 hosts and has raised $150,000 as part of Y-Combinator Winter 2019 batch.
Akshay Bhushan, Partner, Lightspeed India Partners, said, “With the uptake of data usage, it’s clear that more and more of our lives are moving online. While this is unlocking exciting new digital use cases, we’re beginning to see more and more chronic loneliness. As we connect more into online portals, we’re disconnecting from the world around us. MyScoot is a full-circle solution, using technology to solve a side-effect problem technology has created. We were impressed by the team’s micro-community-driven and unique approach to solving the problem.”
Presently, besides MyScoot, there is only BeatMap startup with similar objective in the industry.