[Funding alert] Social experience startup MyScoot raises $1.7M from Lightspeed, Mayfield India, Kunal Shah, others
MyScoot, based in Delhi, offers bold, fresh, experiences and parties of all kinds from dinner parties, board game brunches, Salsa dance socials, to backyard bonfires.
![[Funding alert] Social experience startup MyScoot raises $1.7M from Lightspeed, Mayfield India, Kunal Shah, others](https://images.yourstory.com/cs/2/70651a30-2d6d-11e9-aa97-9329348d4c3e/Image3t701564471977531.jpg?mode=crop&crop=faces&ar=2%3A1&format=auto&w=1920&q=75)
Delhi-based MyScoot, a community platform for home-hosted experiences, has raised $1.7 million (Rs 11.7 crores) in a round of seed funding from Lightspeed India Partners, Venture Highway, and Mayfield India. Kunal Shah, CEO of CRED, and Maninder Gulati, Chief Strategy Officer at OYO Rooms also participated in the round.
MyScoot is a platform verified individuals use to attend home-hosted social events - with other members. It is like the Airbnb for parties, where users, post-completing MyScoot’s five-step verification process, are able to ‘host’ or ‘book’.
The host sets the price point for their offering and earns money as they select guests to attend. Built to establish real connections, MyScoot offers bold, fresh, experiences and parties of all kinds from dinner parties, board game brunches, Salsa dance socials, to backyard bonfires.
MyScoot plans to use the funds to hire its core team, recruit tech talent and more deeply penetrate their current market. In a statement, the startup said that the funding will help MyScoot build AI-based social experience recommendations, develop its safe-guards, and establish a stronghold in their already active Delhi and Bengaluru market.
The startup believes that loneliness is on the rise with millennials on the move, following work opportunities across cities and countries and that it can be hard to make meaningful connections in a city where one has no previous network. The World Economic Forum identified ‘loneliness’ as an epidemic in 2019, it said “chronic loneliness is a health concern across generations, with 40 percent of under-25-year-old people reporting that they feel lonely.”
In a statement, Suyash Sinha, CEO and Co-Founder, MyScoot said,
"Our goal is to reach more of the world’s largest youth cohort, Indian millennials, enabling them to create bonds and build friendships in a new and meaningful way.”
Realising firsthand how difficult it was to meet and connect with people in bars and pubs, MyScoot’s founders, Suyash Sinha, Sidharth Rawat, Akhil Tripathi, and Somvir Yadav, felt the need to for a better way to meet people. So in August 2017, they started MyScoot in beta version and marked 500 registrations within days.
Seeing the demand, the founders launched the company formally in September 2018. The Delhi-based startup raised $150,000 as part of Y-Combinator Winter 2019 batch and has completed 2,000 bookings with 200 hosts till date.
Akshay Bhushan, Partner, Lightspeed India Partners, highlighting the reason behind choosing to invest in MyScoot, said,
“With the uptake of data usage, it’s clear that more and more of our lives are moving online. While this is unlocking exciting new digital use cases, we’re beginning to see more and more chronic loneliness. As we connect more into online portals, we’re disconnecting from the world around us. MyScoot is a full-circle solution, using technology to solve a side-effect problem technology has created. We were impressed by the team's micro-community-driven and unique approach to solving the problem.”
(Edited by Saheli Sen Gupta)
