Zorro, a pseudonymous social network has raised $3.2 million in seed round by Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Founder & CEO, Paytm), Ritesh Agarwal (Founder & CEO, OYO Rooms), Ashish Hemrajani (Founder & CEO, BookMyShow), Kunal Shah (Founder & CEO, CRED), Ankiti Bose (Founder & CEO, Zilingo), Ashneer Grover (Founder & CEO, BharatPe), Lalit Keshre (Founder & CEO, Groww), Jitendra Gupta (Founder & CEO, Jupiter), Gaurav Gupta (Co-founder, Zomato) and multiple other angel investors.
Venture capital firms 3one4 Capital & 9Unicorns Ventures co-led the seed funding round, Eximius Ventures, Roots Ventures and Venture Catalyst also participated in the fundraising alongside 15 unicorn founders.
Zorro is co-founded by serial-entrepreneurs Jasveer Singh, Abhishek Asthana and Deepak Kumar. Jasveer has already built successful startups. Abhishek, popularly known as GabbbarSingh on the internet holds a decade of experience building brands & businesses. Deepak Kumar, CTO has 7+ years of building scalable technologies at Inshorts, Paralleldots&BlackBeltHelp, the statement said.
“One key issue in this day and age is paid PR, paid tweets and even paid reviews. Often the truth is hidden on the 6th page of Google search results. Zorro is a pseudonymous social network, which is ring-fenced, and content moderated. This gives you a clean & authentic timeline consisting of people from your network, sharing & consuming content freely. Moreover, we are fortunate to have some great founders on board, who bring a wealth of experience to the table,” says, Co-founder & CEO, Jasveer Singh.
Abhishek, COO says, “We got an excellent response from people during our MVP testing, and we found out the need to have a pseudonymous network, which lets you express yourself freely & fairly to the people who are strictly a part of your existing network, basically a ring-fence. Hence, Zorro has been positioned as a means to discover the truth.”
3one4 Capital, says, “We are living in the creator’s economy and thus there is a growing need for a pseudonymous platform where you can be yourself. Pseudonymity allows people to control their reputation and exposure to unwanted social interactions & consume/create content freely and fairly. This is a great opportunity, and we have complete trust in the founding team of Zorro to execute this ambitious idea and scale it to millions of users.”
“We will use the funds to build a strong tech team, with strong problem-solving skills that can build and scale a world-class product,” Jasveer Singh added.
Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Founder of 9Unicorns and Venture Catalysts said, “We are living in a digital world when content is the king, and the content creators are kingmakers. However, there is always a risk of being at risk of being trolled and targeted for the content you share. Hence there was a pressing need for a pseudonymous platform where people can have free-wheeling conversations without the fear of being judged. This is a great opportunity for us to be a part of this innovative platform which we expect has the potential to tap at least 10% of the total Indian population. This has the potential to become the largest social media platform in this segment.”
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