Hyderabad-based Samosa Labs, a social media and chat entertainment app, has raised ₹48 crores ($7 million) in a fresh funding round led by Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, along with Sequoia Capital India.
This investment brings the total funds raised by Samosa Labs to ₹61.8 crores ($9 million), including a ₹8.9 crores ($1.3 million) seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital.
This marks the second investment for Xiaomi in the social media space, after leading an $18 million funding in regional language social platform Sharechat.
Samosa Labs was founded by Abhilash Inumella, along with Abhimanyu Pamulapati and Rahul Reddy Koora in 2015. It provides an entertainment platform for users to create audios and gifs that can be shared across different social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp.
It also enables users to create content in a number of Indian languages including Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada, which increases its penetration in the regional pockets. Along with audio and gif content, the platform has also launched video-enabled content for its users.
Samosa Labs has an online integration with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger where the bulk of the content created on the platform is shared, with several brands and studios looking at the platform as a mode to drive traffic and to enhance digital marketing.
“About 98% of the traffic on Samosa Labs is driven through chat shares on WhatsApp. About 5,000 videos are created every day by users across genres of romance, comedy, devotion including elements from pop culture such as songs, movies, images, etc.,” said, Abhilash Inumella, CEO, Samosa Labs.
Samosa Labs is yet to make any revenues from its operations but with s strong user base of 5,00,000, a majority of whom are based in south India, the startup is looking at different monetization models. It is exploring advertising revenue models, as it focuses on building its brand.
With a strong market hold in south India, Samosa Labs is looking at the north Indian market to expand its content outreach.
As per a report by Deloitte India in January 2018, vernacular content consumers in India are expected to be 2.5 times more than English consumers by 2021. Samosa Labs will be looking to focus on this market as it looks to expand in the country.