India’s largest location-based social network Public raises Rs 300 crore

Public App, India’s largest location-based social network, has secured Rs 300 crore in funding from A91 Partners with participation from existing investors. Public had raised Rs 260 crore in funding led by Addition, along with SIG and Tanglin Venture Partners six months ago.

Public App is a social network for everything hyper-local - from hyper-local updates and happenings to hyper-local commerce, jobs, classifieds and more. While political leaders, government authorities, media houses and citizen journalists use the app to connect with communities and disseminate verified and trustworthy video content; local businesses like shops, astrologers, doctors, lawyers use the platform to reach out to the local consumers. The app is already being used by over 50,000 elected officials, government authorities and citizen journalists to connect with their locality. Additionally, many local businesses have also started to use the app to reach their customers in the locality.

“We are very excited to have A91 Partners join us in our journey towards building the world’s largest location-based social network,” said Azhar Iqubal, Founder & CEO, Public App. “With more than 50 million active users in India, we first aim to connect the hyper-local communities of Bharat and later make the product Global,” Iqubal added.

Gautam Mago, General Partner at A91 Partners said "Public has continued to maintain best in class retention and engagement metrics while scaling. We look forward to working closely with the founders to help build an outstanding company." 

While regional India is using Public to connect to their localities, many brands such as GSK, Amazon, HDFC Bank, have also started to use Public as a medium to reach out to these audiences. “We are building customized ad solutions for brands to better engage with the audiences while keeping the user experience intact”, said Iqubal.

The plan is to utilize the funding towards rapid scaling up of tech infrastructure, content offerings and employee base to further speed up the growth and continue improving on retention and engagement

Public app was launched by Inshorts, India’s #1 short news aggregator, in April 2019. Within a short span of 6 months from launch, Public became the No 1 ranked app on the play store in the category. The app is available in all major Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Assamese, Gujarati and Marathi.