Akshay Kumar-backed Social Swag raises $3.5 mn in pre series A round

New age content platform Social Swag, backed by actors Akshay Kumar and Rana Daggubati, Collective Artists and Mahesh Bhupathi, announced raising $3.5 million in a Pre Series A round. The round has been led by IMEF and Unicorn India Ventures, which has made its maiden announcement in a content creator economy specialist platform.

Other investors who participated in the round are Vinay Agarwal, Ritesh Deshmukh, Raghu Subramanian, Edward Menezes, The Shekama Family Trust, and The Blume Founders fund.

Started in 2020, Social Swag is building out a Celebrity/ influencer commerce platform and has been growing 40% m-o-m for the last 5 months and is poised to continue this trajectory as the online story in India continues to generate exciting outcomes, said the company in a statement.

Parth Gandhi who launched IMEF as an entertainment fund says, “We are backing various entertainment opportunities in India and with Social Swag’s offering across multiple products we believe they will become an outlier in the space. That is why we chose them as our first investment.”

Bhaskar Majumdar, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures, says, “As a fund, we strongly believe that the content creator economy is ripe for explosive growth. We have been tracking Social Swag for close to 6 months now and are very bullish on the moat they have been able to create vis-a-vis access to talent and building technology to make it accessible. We are excited to back them in their journey.”

Social Swag has multiple verticals of its offering like Masterclasses, Live learning and personal shout outs etc. The Company runs on a subscription model giving unlimited access to the curated content on the platform. Top celebrities and achievers like Lara Dutta, Bhavish Aggarwal, Abhinav Bindra, Akshay Kumar, Vicky Ratnani, Avinash Gowarikar are some of the most reputed names whose masterclasses are currently running on the platform. Social Swag aspires to build the biggest content platform which is made in India for the world.

Rana Daggubatti, actor, entrepreneur & Co founder, Social Swag, says, “We are excited to welcome our new investors and our focus will remain to create a platform where various people will find relevant content for themselves across different products. These would be a mix of entertainment, self development, skill enhancement and passion content.”

According to a recent industry report, there are over 1,50,000 professional content creators in India who are able to monetize their services. The global content creators’ economy is estimated to be over $100 billion.

SNK Advisors advised Social Swag on the transaction.