Top 10 Indian Social Media Startups Building For Non-English Users

                               

Leher: Founded by Vikas Malpani and Atul Jaju in 2018, Leher allows you to host live audio and video discussions with your club members who share the same interests. Despite being early to the live audio scene, Leher didn’t get as much attention as its counterpart Clubhouse. However, their platform now has more than 150,000 users without the help of any investors.

Lokal App: Founded by Jani Pasha and Vipul Chaudhary in 2018, Lokal is a hyperlocal news sharing platform that started offering news in Jani’s hometown Kodad in his native language Telugu. They have since expanded their reach by enabling more than 7 million users to access news in their own language.

Pocket FM: Founded by Prateek Dixit, Nishanth S and Rohan Nayak in 2018, Pocket FM is an Indian language audio streaming platform that only managed to get 10,000 users in the first 18 months of their launch. However, they continued to build their content library by partnering with content creators. Since then, the number of users on their platform has skyrocketed to 20 million within a year with 10,000 of them being paying subscribers.

BulBul TV: Founded by Sachin Bhatia, Sanjay Yadav, and Atit Jain in 2018, BulBul is an online live video shopping platform that lets influencers sell products directly to their followers by answering their queries live in their own language. BulBul already has 5 million users on their platform and is selling products worth $2 million.

TrulyMadly: Founded by Hitesh Dhingra, Rahul Kumar, and Sachin Bhatia in 2013, TrulyMadly started as an online dating platform. However, despite raising $5.7 million in 2015, TrulyMadly was unable to find much success in India’s dating world. The startup was about to shut down after all the founders jumped ship in 2018. But things changed for TrulyMadly when one of their founding team members Snehil Khanor stepped up and decided to build TrulyMadly from scratch after pivoting towards marriage and finding long-term partners.

Kutumb: Founded in 2020, Kutumb is enabling Indian language users to build interest-based communities - serving as a platform for sharing news, member updates and encouraging discussions. Unlike WhatsApp groups, where the number of members is limited to just 256, Kutumb’s communities can be scaled to 10 million members offering an experience much like Reddit but for Indian language users.

Bombinate Technologies (Vokal and Koo): Founded by Aprameya Radhakrishnan and Mayank Bidawatka, Bombinate Technologies first launched Vokal in 2018, which is an Indian language knowledge-sharing platform – also referred to as the Indian version of Quora. After the success of Vokal, they launched Koo App in 2020 – which is a vernacular microblogging platform. Also, termed as the Indian version of Twitter.

Apna: Founded by Nirmit Parikh in 2019, Apna is a professional networking platform for blue-collar workers. Apna is enabling these blue-collar workers to upskill, network and find jobs – much like what LinkedIn is doing for the white-collar professionals. In just two years, Apna has onboarded more than 10 million users.

Meesho: Meesho’s journey started in 2015 when Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal launched a location-based fashion discovery platform FashNear. While their initial idea failed within a couple of months, they realized an even bigger opportunity in helping these retailers create their own digital storefronts, enabling digital transactions and handling their logistics. Today, Meesho is enabling more than 13 million micro-entrepreneurs and 90% of whom are housewives. Their investors have poured in $515 million to help them turn Meesho into a unicorn.

Mohalla Tech (Sharechat and Moj): Founded by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Singh and Farid Ahsan, Mohalla Tech launched Sharechat in 2015 - which is one of India’s most popular vernacular social media platforms. Today, they have more than 160 million monthly active users on their platform. They also launched a short-video app called Moj in 2020 after the ban of TikTok which has also garnered more than 120 million monthly active users. Mohalla Tech has raised a total of $825 million from their investors – valuing the startup at a cool $2.1 billion valuation.