Bluegape showed up on our radar in 2012, when they raised a massive amount of funding to start what is essentially an online merchandise store. They shut down in 2014: now they’re back as a user-generated content. Apparently, it’s divided into Movies, Music, Gaming, How-To, Politics, Activism, Celebrities, Pets, Technology, Sports, Travel, Relationships, TV Shows, Motivation, Business, Health and Fashion and is supposed to triggers the user to share the content on social media (Facebook, Twitter) coupled with how that person feels about the content. Bluegape’s platform allows users’ tastes to be combined into lists, complete with visual representations, that can be incorporated into other sites. Think of it like Quora meets BuzzFeed, so basically they have a Quora-esque user-generated content creation model and a Buzzfed-esque social media based consumption model.
In just a short period of 3 months, they’ve gone from a fan merchandise store to a a Buzzfeed/Quora system, and has managed to raise a total of $200,000USD from ah! Ventures located in Mumbai. The process was headed by Rudy Gopalakrishnan, who is an executive at Fidelity India. Gopalakrishnan also gave out $160,000 USD for the process.
According to Sahil Baghla, the co-founder and CEO of Bluegape, they’re currently clocking 4 million page views and generates some 200 lists per day and they plan to hit somewhere in the vicinity of 30 million page views by the end of 2015.
Bluegape is not the only fish in these waters – the Indian online media arena has been buzzing with activity. ScoopWhoop raised US1.6 million USD from Bharti Softbank, NewsInShorts managed to raise $4 million USD from Tiger Global, and Scroll has raised a yet to be revealed amount of funds from Omidyar Network and Media Development Investment Fund based in New York.
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