Social network with speaking pictures, VoxWeb, raises $1M
VoxWeb, a social network powered by "speaking pictures", has raised $1 million from individual investors today. Successfully concluding its third round of funding, VoxWeb promoters and employees will continue to hold 80 percent ownership rights and 100 percent voting rights in the company.
The funding will be deployed to strengthen backend technologies and to add innovative and engaging front-end features to cater to the new generation of social media users termed as "Facebook-Nevers". The company will also invest in scaling marketing efforts to increase its user base. In addition, the company may also spend in brand-building by running grass-root campaigns in colleges.
Commenting on the latest round of funding, Yash Mishra, Founder, VoxWeb said, “With VoxWeb, we want to create the first ever global consumer internet product from India and the app has already got users from 97 countries. With our unique voice-augmented photos technology, the company is focussed on designing and developing refreshingly new products adding a new dimension to social media consumption around the world. We believe our new round of funding will further hasten the scaling-up of operations.”
Founded in 2015, VoxWeb is the brainchild of Yash Mishra, IIT Kanpur graduate, and a JP Morgan research analyst. It was created after the two pooled in $100,000 of their savings. Both the iOS and Android apps have been rolled out. The app allows the creation of speaking pictures by enabling users to add voice notes of up to 11 seconds to an image.
VoxWeb had raised its previous round of funding of $3,50,000 in December 2015, and yet another one before that, worth $100,000 from an investor named Jitendra Gupta. Their other product is ‘speaking selfies,’ which they have christened as ‘Voxies’. The design patent of “speaking pictures”, which is a "picture with an orange line", was filed in the United States where the orange line indicates or is the symbol of “speaking picture.”
Since its launch, VoxWeb has garnered a user-base of more than half a million and trended on Twitter on Thursday, June 22. VoxWeb is in the process of onboarding more artists and politicians over the next few months as celebrities have shown huge interest in using ‘speaking-pics’ to effectively connect and engage with young internet users. Ministry of AYUSH has become the first government department to join VoxWeb and use voxies to promote Yoga innovatively in the run-up to International Yoga Day on June 21.
