Exclusive: Surge leads seed round in Bharat-focused community enabler Kutumb

Social community enabler Kutumb has been positioning itself as a Reddit for non-English speaking population (aka Bharat). The six-month-old platform that fosters community for the Hindi speaking population has raised Rs 15 crore in its seed funding.

While Sequoia’s Surge led the round, angel investors Kunal Bahl, Rohit Bansal along with Whiteboard Capital, AngelList and Udaan’s co-founder Sujeet Kumar also participated in the second financing round.

Kutumb has allotted Rs 3,073 preference shares at an issue price of 42,297.9 per share to raise the above amount, regulatory filings show.  It’s worth noting that Surge didn’t disclose the name of three startups who were part of its fourth cohort. Kutumb appears to be one of them.

In September, Kutumb raised Rs 3.5 Cr in its pre Seed round from a clutch of individuals including Roman Saini, Gaurav Munjal, Dinesh Godara and Ranjeet Pratap Singh among others. AngeList's syndicate also participated in the company’s maiden financing round.

Kutumb is building communities across several genres in Hindi and it’s likely to be opened up in other vernacular languages. The app appears to be in early-stage but claims to handle communities of 100 users to 10 million users with much better experience than Facebook or WhatsApp groups. 

At the moment, the app’s target audience is the tier II and III cities for Northern India. Some of the notable groups on Kutumb include Shikshakgan, Khatu Shyam, Sarkari Exam, Railway Karmchari, and Bank Karmchari.

Entrackr queries sent to Sequoia Capital and Kutumb on Friday didn’t elicit any response. We will update the story in case they respond.

Founded by ex Pratilipi’s executives Mohit Sharma, Naveen Dewangan and Vipul Allawadhi, Kutumb has been positioning itself as Reddit for Bharat. Building and fostering community in regional languages is one of the unexplored segments. 

As per Fintrackr's estimates, the company has been valued nearly Rs 67 crore in its seed round, registering a 3.2X jump as compared to its valuation of Rs 21.04 crore during the pre-seed round in September.

Following the allotment of seed round shares, promoters’ equity will be diluted to 63.81% while Surge has acquired 19.61% stake and AngelList will control a 7.04% stake in the company.

Over the past few years, there has been a significant amount of actions happening in the vernacular social media space. ShareChat and Bytedance-owned Helo are examples of the first wave in the segment. Kutumb seems to be a serious horizontal effort towards offering a meaningful platform for the Hindi speaking population. The app competes with Facebook, WhatsApp and ShareChat.