Social and Group payment startup MyPoolin raises seed funding from Rajan Anandan, Sharad Sharma and other angels
MyPoolin is a mobile peer-to-peer and group payments social network, which helps people plan and pool money together for movies, events, parties, group-gifting and trips, through an app while killing uncomfortable “you owe me” situations.
According to the team, the addressable market size for social transactions (movies, events, dining, gifting and travel/trips) in India is $3 billion. MyPoolin is an aggregator of multiple mobile wallets and payment systems striving to provide interoperability for seamless group payments and social experiences.
Incubated by Investopad since its inception, MyPoolin has raised seed-funding from group of angels - Sharad Sharma (iSPIRT), Rajan Anandan (MD Google India), Sunil Kalra, Amit Ranjan (Co-Founder - SlideShare), Rohan & Arjun Malhotra (Investopad), Jaspreet Bindra (ex-Microsoft, AskMe), Gautam Gandhi (ex-Google), Steve Sule and Gagan Dugal (Matrix Cellular).
Founded in January 2015, by Ankit Singh, an alumnus of Delhi College of Engineering and FMS Delhi, and Rohit Taneja, an alumnus of IIT Delhi, MyPoolin launched as a web app initially and gained traction on the website hitting INR 10 lakh in revenue in its first four months, according to the founders. The new Android app brings the planning and payments solution to a mobile audience. Launched in mid-May on the Android Play Store, MyPoolin climbed up to become the top 10 new free apps in its category just three days after its launch.
On MyPoolin, a user (pool organiser) shares a plan for movie, gifting, or events etc with friends, who can then discuss and vote/opt in-out within the app. Once everyone decides whether they’re in or out or a plan is finalised, users can seamlessly pay their share using any mode of payment. If they link a wallet like Mobikwik with the app, the money gets debited automatically making the whole process instantaneous. The pool organiser then simply redeems the pooled money through a transfer to their bank account or online on merchants such as Amazon, Jabong, PVR and MakeMyTrip etc.
Ankit is excited about the opportunity ahead of him.
Young Indians are at the helm of India turning into a consumption driven economy, they are more social and online than before. Its the right time to make payments social and not boring anymore. And importantly, we have over the past two years seen the Indian payments landscape evolve, While it's still quite fragmented, it provides us with a great opportunity to solve a problem and make payments seamless. We have added a social layer on top of it and can plug different payment mechanism outside India to build a big global consumer product out of India,he told YourStory.
Rohan Malhotra, Founder of Investopad said,
My Poolin is a combination of Venmo (acquired by BrainTree for $26 million) in terms of adding a social layer on top of payments and Tilt (backed by Andreessen Horowitz) in terms of seamless group payments. The use cases are abundant, ranging from group travel and trips, to events and movies or even dining out.
So no more "you owe me" moments?. Tell us what you think of this trend in your comments below.
