Pokkt gets $ 5 Mn  funding from existing and new investors

Mumbai–based video advertising and app monetization platform, Pokkt, has secured close to $5Mn in a funding round led by existing investors along with new investors such as Segnel Venture, Shinji Kimura and Sundar Chanrai. The startup will use the funds in product development, increasing the technology team and global expansion. Prior to this round, it raised $2.5 Mn in Series A from JAFCO Asia, SingTel’s Innov8, Jungle Ventures and K Ganesh. It was part of Rajesh Sawhney GSF Accelerator. Pokkt was founded in October 2012 by Rohit Sharma (former CEO of Reliance Digital), Vaibhav Odhekar (founding member Zapak.com) andManish Tewari (former founder of Koovs). It has over 70 people strong team across its offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangkok, Singapore, Jakarta, Vietnam, Malaysia and more, including 20-member strong Pokkt Labsin Bangalore. It is building a pipeline of new products around video and gaming app  slated for next year, and is looking to beef up its technology team for the same. Pokkt has four major offering in the market namely Connect, Play, Money and Prime. Its core business revolves around Connect and Play, where it reaches to Game and Video app developers providing SDKs. Pokkt Play is a video ads platform for video campaign.  “We have lot of product launches lined up for the next few months and we need to scale out product development and technology team. One key area of investment will be in analytics and Big data. In last one year, we expanded to new geographic location like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and other regions as well,” said, Rohit Sharma, Founder & CEO of Pokkt.

Pokkt claims that over 150 game developers that are using its SDKs. Some of its marquee clients in the gaming world are Octro (makers of rummy India, Teenpatti etc), Rovio Games (makers of Angry birds),Nazara Technologies (makers of Rounders) and Reliance Games. Another offering, Pocket Money is a B2C offering that provides free mobile recharge talk time to users. It asks users to download apps from their platform or by participate in brand surveys and rewards them with free call talktime. Pocket Money has over 4Mn users.

(http://inc42.com/flash-feed/pokkt-raises-5-mn-funding/)