Sumit Jain, ex-CEO and co-founder of online real estate platform CommonFloor, has launched a new startup Opentalk.
The new startup is a voice-based social platform that connects people over their topics of interest. It allows people to have conversations with another user from across the globe. It also offers peer-to-peer learning connections for students, alumni groups and professional networks.
The platform vision is to unlock the world’s latent knowledge through voice conversations. Through Opentalk, Sumit, who is the CEO of the platform, wants to create a platform that will allow people, professionals, experts or public figures catering to one’s emotional, functional, and aspirational need.
Opentalk will make talking easy, fun, and rewarding, because we believe that talking can open a world of possibilities, Sumit was quoted as saying by ET. Though, he is yet to respond to Entrackr’s queries regarding its new startup.
Currently, he claims to have garnered 400,000 app downloads across 50 countries in the last eight months.
Sumit quit Commonfloor in early 2017, a year after its merger with Quikr. CommonFloor was founded in 2007 by Sumit Jain, Lalit Mangal and Vikas Malpani. It raised $63 million in four rounds of funding from Tiger Global, Accel and Google Capital. Later, it struggled to raise more funds leading to investors swapping CommonFloor stocks with that of Quikr.
Now, Sumit along with his IIT classmate Ashwani Jain, former director of strategy at Commonfloor, has started this venture. Ashwani is the COO of the new venture. Opentalk’s parent company is registered in Singapore as Opentalk Pte Ltd.
Opentalk is available to users across the globe in all countries.
Founders plan to adopt a freemium business model, where several premium features will be made available to paid users. At present, if users talk beyond 20 minutes, they are asked to pay up. Users will also have option of adding voice effect during the call.
