Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra recently announced that he has invested $1mn in Gurugram-based tech startup Hapramp. The three-year-old startup works on various technologies like social networking and blockchain.
The investment from Mahindra ends his two-year-long quest in finding an Indian startup working in the field of social media. After the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, Mahindra had announced via Twitter a funding opportunity for an Indian social media startup that met certain criteria.
Mahindra had said that the startup needed to be an indigenously built social networking company that is very widely owned & professionally managed & willingly regulated. He had asked former Chief Digital Officer of Mahindra Group Jaspreet Bindra to work with him in finding the right start-up.
Announcing the investment on Twitter, Anand Mahindra said, “Took 2 yrs, but I finally found the start-up I was looking for! @Hapramp is indigenous, built by 5 young founders & brings together a best-in-class combination of creativity, technology & data protection. Look out for @gosocial_app their social networking platform.”
“The Hapramp team is building a Web 3.0 social network. It is built on emerging digital technologies, has a solid business model which rewards content creators, protects personal data, and best of all, is built here locally in India,” Bindra said.
Bindra now joins the startup as an Executive Advisor and Mentor to the founding team while Anand Mahindra came on board as a lead investor.
The startup was founded in 2018 by five students- Pratyush Singh, Mofid Ansari, Ankit Kumar, Shubhendra Vikram and Rajat Dangi of Indian Institute of Information Technology-Vadodara.
In its early days, Hapramp was incubated by Huddle, a sector-agnostic incubator that is based in Gurugram. It has also invested in Hapramp. In addition to its flagship social networking solution GoSocial, Hapramp also operates 1Ramp.io, a social media platform powered by Steem Blockchain, and Asteria Protocol. Asteria Protocol will help platforms to privately and securely treat public data.
“We are honoured and excited. This is a massive approval of our mission to give creators the right to their content. We plan to use the funds to expand our platform and want to empower creators,” said Hapramp co-founder and CEO Shubhendra Vikram.
The startup currently has 12 employees and plans to hire more by the end of the year. The founders are based in Gurugram, while the staff is located across the country.
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