PremiumBLOOMBERG : Mumbai-based digital entertainment firm Pocket Aces has secured ₹100 crore from Sequoia India, DSP Group and 3one4 Capital, besides other prominent investors, the company said on Tuesday.
Pocket Aces plans to use the fresh capital to invest in content, technology and talent. It also aims to multiply its social distribution by starting three new content channels in the next 12 months. It is targeting a run-rate of 1 billion monthly video views on original content by 2020.
Founded in 2013 by Ashwin Suresh, Anirudh Pandita and Aditi Shrivastava, Pocket Aces operates three socially distributed content channels: FilterCopy (short videos), Dice Media (long-form videos) and Gobble (food and lifestyle videos). It also operates a direct-to-consumer platform, Loco (live and interactive e-sports app). Since its last fundraising activity in 2016, the company claims to have increased its viewership, clocking around 500 million monthly video views.
The company uses local advertising to monetize and currently works with brands, which employs the company to create content around their brand message and requirements. It has so far catered to PepsiCo, Flipkart, Amazon, OnePlus, Google, Kingfisher and Kotak Mahindra Bank.
Last year, the company launched its Loco app, which has over 15 million registered users. The company has grown its team strength to 145 with offices in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi.
Pocket Aces competes with other video-focused content platforms such as The Viral Fever, which had raised $5 million from Tiger Global in May, besides Denture Capital, which is self-funded and creates original video content for startups, and Culture Machine.
“With massive penetration of mobile internet and a large consumer base hungry for local content, we believe there has never been a better time to build a large content business here," said Suresh, Pandita and Shrivastava in a joint statement.
