With Jungle Ventures as funder, POKKT hopes to make Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia as its biggest markets. CEO Rohit Sharma hopes to break even in 12 months.
POKKT (Pocket), an alternate mobile payment platform, today announced that it has closed a seed round with Singapore-based venture fund Jungle Ventures, and co-founder and managing director of Qyuki Digital Media, Samir Bangara. The funding amount is undisclosed.
Having been part of India’s GSF Accelerator, the Mumbai-based startup was founded by Rohit Sharma, Vaibhav Odhekar and Sharad Ingule. The team told e27 that they have about 25,000 users on the platform. Sharma said, “With this round of funding, we will build our team further. We are getting great traction in the market and are confident of scaling POKKT multifold by the end of this year.”
With Jungle Ventures in the picture, POKKT is now looking at expanding in Southeast Asia, with Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia as its biggest markets. Amit Anand, Managing Partner at Jungle Ventures, said that the venture capital firm is strengthening its commitment to “help Indian startups build strategic relationships with the rest of Asia, (which is) a trend that is likely to accelerate over the coming years.”
Currently, POKKT has two revenue streams, which is either a revenue share from the publisher or developer, or revenue from advertisers for delivering working campaigns.
Sharma, who has over 14 years of experience building teams and businesses as the former CEO of Digital Business, Reliance ADA Group, said that they are hoping to break even within 12 months. He added, “Because our revenues comes from both publishers and advertisers and our gross margin is high.”
Read also: Social shopping site Coupay to hit Southeast Asia, raising seed round
For online publishers of digital content like games, music or softwares, an advertiser-funded model might be one way to increase monetization. This allows these content owners or distributors to reach out to non-paying users at every touch-point they could be exiting from, and enabling these users to join a community and hopefully, be a paying member.
Interestingly, in a Nielsen survey via an Ernst & Young report about monetizing content in a digital world, “85 percent of Internet users believe that online content that is currently free should remain free.” Monetization is still a tough nut to crack, and especially so for online publishers in emerging markets like India.
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