YourQuote raises $1 million seed funding led by IDG Ventures

In a significant move that will unlock the untapped potential of user-generated content, YourQuote, India’s fastest growing original content and digital community platform, has secured $1 million in seed funding. The funding was led by IDG Ventures India, and also saw participation from Atul Goel of the Essel City Group and Axilor. YourQuote was part of Axilor’s 100-day accelerator program, as part of its Summer ‘17 batch.

Started by IIT-Delhi alumni Harsh Snehanshu and Ashish Singh in early 2017, YourQuote has shown rapid organic growth and built a sticky community in short span of time. The YourQuote mobile app is available on Android as well as iOS, and an overall user base of over 500k users from across India. With 4.5 million+ posts (original video and written content) in more than 15 languages, the platform has been registering an impressive growth of 20-30% monthly growth. Via their offline community, YourQuote has so far organised more than 300 offline Open Mic events across the country in more than 35 cities and colleges, which further strengthens the community engagement.

Speaking on the investment, Harsh Snehanshu, Co-founder & CEO, YourQuote, said, “There is a very apparent dearth of expression-oriented original content platforms in India. YourQuote was started off to plug that gap by giving Indians a stage for self-expression, a platform which allows them to share what they feel, what they experience, in their own words, in a language that they are most comfortable with. This approach has allowed us to register rapid growth, almost all of it organic, and generate heavy traction within and outside of top metro cities. The recently-concluded funding round will further help us to build on our early success by expanding into user-generated video content and scaling up our offline networking initiatives.”

With the capital infusion, the platform will be taking its core value proposition further by increasing video-based creation and consumption, scaling its offline activities on a pan-India level to create a large and diverse community of contributors and readers. YourQuote aims to provide an integrated content platform for self-expression to India’s growing millennial population, largely focused on vernacular language users, which today form the bulk of the user base.

Karan Mohla, Partner and Executive Director IDG Ventures India Advisors, said, “YourQuote has the most active and engaged active user base in the country comprising of young users who use the app for over 16 minutes of engagement per day across 4-5 sessions. At the core of it is a team of highly-talented founders who value original content and via their mobile platform are tapping into the lucrative opportunity that the country’s massive vernacular market has opened up. Vernacular users have very few media and content platforms geared towards creating relevant and engaged communities and we strongly believe original content caters to that basic need in an innovative manner. We fully back the team’s vision and mission, and are confident that they will be able to take YourQuote to the next level of growth and establish it as the definitive mobile-first platform for original content in India, both short-form and video.”

In addition to English, the platform also offers users a chance to share their experiences and stories in Hindi and other vernacular languages – such as Tamil, Bangla, Kannada, and Punjabi – which comprise a significant share of its impressive content repository. This unique vision, coupled with its mobile-first approach, has helped it in garnering strong organic growth and user adoption across the country.

“We believe we have the right product at the right time along with the right team to capture the vast vernacular market that has opened up thanks to Jio. The two categories, vernacular digital write-ups and digital video content, are fast-growing verticals and our team is perfectly poised to take on this opportunity. We have hired people from all across India to help us build the product and community according to the different regional requirements, which is where YourQuote differentiates itself from any other content platform in the country,” added Ashish Singh, Co-founder & CTO, YourQuote.