Wishberry Closes Pre Series A Lead By iSPIRT’s Sharad Sharma

India’s largest crowdfunding platform for creative artists, Wishberry announced a successful angel round for an undisclosed amount with lead investor Sharad Sharma (iSPIRT) along with Rajan Anandan of Google; Amit Ranjan of SlideShare; Alok Mittal of the Indian Angel Network; Venkat S. Raju of Kyron Global, and investors from LetsVenture.

Priyanka Agarwal, cofounder and CEO at Wishberry said, “We have set out on a mission to help showcase the enormous yet unexplored potential of Indian creativity on a global scale.

There are already three films, crowdfunded on Wishberry, which have won the National Award. We want to enable a lot more artists to achieve such feats and won’t stop till we have Indian independent artists winning Oscars or Grammys. It is great to have investors who believe in us and are enabling us to continue on this path.”

Also commenting was Sharad Sharma, lead investor of this round, and cofounder and governing council member of iSPIRT. “The Wishberry founders, Priyanka, (who is a Wharton graduate and serial entrepreneur) and Anshulika (INK fellow and Forbes 30 under 30 winner) have truly understood the consumer needs for creative crowdfunding in India. Now they are looking to innovate crowdfunding for the long tail of artists in India by helping them monetize their content outside of Youtube through a recurring-funding model, inspired by Patreon.

Recurring fan-funding in small denominations could be a game changer in the Indian crowdfunding landscape and make Wishberry a leader in producing independent content,” Sharad said.

Founded in 2012, Wishberry has raised over rupees 10 crores from over 350 crowdfunded projects spanning everything from film, music, theater, dance, and more. The platform has an active community of over 18,000 funders from over 850 cities across 55 countries. Creative artists can upload their project on the company’s website and use this platform to creatively present their unique idea to the world, in an effort to raise funds.

Note - Late last year Wishberry was reported as being easy to hack by a blogger. The same blogger reported the crowdfunding platform’s security around personal information of leading investors was not sufficiently robust.