Hyderabad-based address simplifying solution Zippr raises $1 million funding led by Indian Angel Network
Central location management service that enables users to create and share short codes, Zippr has announced today that they have received a million dollars in funding. This round is led by Indian Angel Network while few private equity investors have participated as well.
Zipprs are unique eight digit alphanumeric codes like YSMP1204 assigned to each location on a map. It can be shared with friends or vendors to avoid low value conversations around finding an address and enables services to reach a customer in a jiffy.
Where will the funding be utilized?
The funding will be broadly used for following things:
- Consumer adoption increase via offline channels.
- Scaling up technology infrastructure.
- Growing the team.
- The above two additions are primarily targeted to strengthen the ability to work with large enterprise like banks and hospitals.
Why did Indian Angel Network invest?
CEO and founder of Zippr, Aditya Vuchi shared the story behind funding, “I’d ran into Sanjay Mehta of IAN at an ISB event and spoke to him. He was very receptive and took interest in our product. Within a month we took a decision.” The reasons for IAN’s interest in Zippr can be listed as follows:
- Magnitude of the challenge: There was a tremendous scope to the problem but everyone was just grudging and moving on. This was the first genuine attempt to solve the problem.
- Existing technology infrastructure– Since the solution was available for smartphone users adnd Zippr had almost doubled the number of codes generated, there was enough on board to see it as promising. They had also built API’s for developers to fiddle with.
- Traction – There is good market traction, user adoption and equally good number of partners on board.
Zippr is currently present in 18 different countries with the focus in India. They have majority of usage from tier-1 cities in the country with maximum contribution from Hyderabad, company’s HQ.
The vision of Zipping ahead
Currently, Zippr has 12 people with three of them working out of Bangalore. Almost 50% of the team are engineers and rest share sales, marketing and other responsibilities.
Aditya mentioned, “ Our primary objective is to make Zippr a mainstream alternative to long address. We still need some sort of education among general audience about Zipprs.”
The company has also partnered with 108 emergency service in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, where people just need to share their Zipppr code to call an ambulance. Aditya added,
This sort of utility value needs to be generated from Zippr among the general audience. We will be focusing on hyperlocal activation and offline marketing to boost our reach within certain demographics. We will reach out via kiosks or door to door marketing to expand to these demographics.