Eloelo raises $13.5 Mn in Series B for its multilingual Live Social Entertainment Platform
Funding round led by Play Ventures will help the company expand into new markets & scale to a $60M revenue run rate by end of the year.
Eloelo, India’s leading live social entertainment platform, today announced it has raised INR 114.3 Cr ($13.5 Mn) in its Series B funding round. The round was led by Play Ventures and saw participation from Kalaari Capital, MIXI Investments, Gameskraft Technologies, Griffin Gaming Partners, Waterbridge Ventures, Courtside Ventures & Rocket Capital.
Play Ventures believes that next-generation social platforms built natively for mobile-first and video-first communities remains a massively untapped opportunity. We’re incredibly excited to partner with the Eloelo team as they pioneer a new category of interactive social entertainment for India and beyond. We're seeing the convergence of creator-led content, real-time community engagement, and gamified social experiences reshaping how digital natives connect and express themselves. We believe Eloelo is at the forefront of this shift, bridging live streaming, gaming and culture in a way that’s uniquely local and globally scalable. As verticalized platforms continue to unbundle legacy social media, we see Eloelo carving out a powerful new category in the social entertainment landscape”, said Anton Backman, Partner at Play Ventures
Eloelo is pioneering a new-age consumer social platform to become the ‘Digital Third Place for Bharat’ by blending interactive live streams with gamification & micro payments. The platform enables creators to host interactive video and audio livestreams in their local languages using AI-led tools to build a community, engage & monetize directly from their audiences.
To date, Eloelo has raised over $50 Mn in funding, including a $22 Mn round in September 2023 led by Courtside Ventures and Griffin Gaming Partners. Eloelo competes directly or indirectly with other platforms like Sharechat, Frnd, Lokal in the live streaming & social entertainment space.
Saurabh Pandey, Founder & CEO of Eloelo says, “Eloelo is bringing the ‘Social’ back in consumer social platforms at a time when most platforms are built for passive content viewing. We believe that feeling connected to others is a primary human need of belongingness, and we are solving that across 8 languages by connecting Indians over interactive livestreams with games, chat & virtual gifting to express their emotions. With close to 400 Million aspirational middle India consumers, we believe this is a massive underserved market which needs India-first solutions. Extremely proud of our team that has built a platform that handles large scale concurrency in live streams in 8+ languages along with building gen-AI tools to empower creators. The Series B round shows us the belief that our existing and new investors place on our vision and execution ability”
According to Lumikai’s latest ‘State of India Interactive Media & Gaming Report’, the media & entertainment market in India is worth $25Bn of which new media like esports, gaming, live streaming & digital media is worth $12Bn, expanding rapidly at a 16% CAGR.
With the Indian digital landscape rapidly evolving, Eloelo’s unique blend of streaming, gamification and social interactivity positions it at the forefront of the creator economy revolution. What is particularly interesting is that unlike other consumer platforms that rely on ads or subscriptions, Eloelo is completely ad-free and does not paywall content.
Speaking on Eloelo’s revenue, Saurabh added, “We switched on monetization in May 2024 after 2-3 years of building the platform capabilities and scaling rapidly to hit PMF. In less than a year of launch, we are now hitting a 200 crore Annual revenue run rate ($23M ARR) with 1.5 Million paying users and are one of the fastest growing platforms in India at this scale. Consumer Tech in India is going through a massive shift away from ad-first models to micro payments, and we are happy to be powering this shift. Gone are the days when India was the MAU farm of the world - we are here to prove that the Bharat-first models have massive monetization potential as we track towards a $60M run rate by end of this year. Beyond just numbers, the impact I am truly proud of at Eloelo is that more than 20,000 creators are now earning a livelihood by streaming and building their own digital communities”
The fresh infusion of Series B capital will enable Eloelo to go deeper into gen-AI use cases, international expansion in Indian diaspora markets and scaling revenue further with more use cases as it aims to build a large media & entertainment powerhouse.
About Eloelo
Incorporated in July 2020, Eloelo is a unique leader in the Live Social Entertainment space by combining interactive live streams with games, chat & creator tools. It is tailored to the communication preferences of young Indians in video and audio formats, in various Indian languages, and ranked at the top in the Entertainment category on Google Play Store, fostering connections among over 90 million users and 150,000+ creators.
