NearFox, a local lifestyle content and discovery platform headquartered in Mumbai, has recently raised a significant, undisclosed amount from Globevestor Angel Fund, CoverFox CTO Devendra Rane, GenY Medium Co-founder and Ex-Principal of Ventureast Ravi Jain and Craftsvilla Products VP Arpan Nagdeve, among others.
Founded by Kiran Patil and Pritesh Mittal, both IIT-Bombay graduates, in 2015, NearFox brings to users the best in the city in food, shopping, beauty, fashion, fitness, entertainment and local travel. It is currently operational in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai.
The startup, valued at Rs 12.5 crore (pre-money), will use the proceeds mainly for expanding the team and launching in more geographies, including the US. NearFox will be the first Indian lifestyle content platform to foray into the competitive but highly rewarding US market, as it eyes greater monetisation opportunities and significantly higher disposable incomes.
"While users are looking for what's happening in the city, businesses are going to the extent of distributing pamphlets with the morning paper to reach out to them. NearFox aims to solve this massive information asymmetry that exists in the local lifestyle segment," said Kiran.
Following 6-fold growth in website traffic over the last six months, NearFox currently gets 2.5 lakh visits per month. The company claims it's completely organic, without any marketing spend. It's keeping costs in check though efficient use of digital media and expects to be operationally profitable in each city it launches in, within a year of the launch.
Ankur Shrivastava, Co-founder at Globevestor, said: "A huge untapped opportunity exists in the localization and personalization of content, especially on local news and discovery. NearFox aims to be at the forefront of this and has assembled an 'A team' very quickly. We've known them for a long time as the go-to people for content marketing and growth hacking, and they're easily the best team to deliver on this vision."
Kiran, a 2004 IIT-Bombay graduate, is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Organic Facts, a website on health and nutrition with a monthly traffic of 3 million. Formerly, he was head of sales at Chaupaati Bazaar, a startup acquired by Future Group in 2010. Pritesh, a 2014 IIT-Bombay graduate, was earlier working with JPMorgan Chase before the duo got together.
NearFox plans to be live in 10 cities by mid-2017, and aims to launch in 200 cities globally over three years, through expansion led by an extensive blogger network and sharp focus on user-generated content.
