MUMBAI: Indian cricketing legend and former captain Sourav Ganguly has made his very first foray in the startup world by investing in Mumbai-based company, Flickstree.
Flickstree, a tech-entertainment company started by Saurabh Singh, Rahul Jain and Nagender Sangra, has raised a seed round Rs 30 million capital from investors like Venture Catalysts, Anirban Aditya & Ankit Aditya (Aditya Group, Kolkata) and Moksh Sports Ventures, along with Sourav Ganguly. Venture Catalysts is leading the round.
Flickstree compiles these free-to-watch curated and personalised online videos from social networks, media sites, and blogs and then creates a custom user video feed. The AI based on patent pending technology, allows Flickstree to effectively curate and personalize the experience for its users.
“Different users have different passions. I decided to invest in Flickstree because they’re at the forefront of innovative cutting edge technology," said Sourav Ganguly.
Ganguly added: While currently users can create only a single video magazine on Flickstree based on their interests, going forward I have asked the founders to enable users create multiple such magazines that users can create and enjoy.”
CEO Singh said, “With so many content producers creating quality content, it becomes difficult for users to discover videos across multiple platforms. Flickstree is trying to organise video content from the free web for users.”
“The free-to-watch video space is extremely fragmented. These videos are published exclusively on separate platforms – a user who has interest in several categories cannot install multiple apps and keep browsing them separately, also owing to limited phone storage. This leads to poor video discovery. Flickstree is trying to solve this consumer problem,” said Satadru Dutta, co-founder Moksh Sports Ventures and Business Development Consultant to Flickstree.
Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, co-founder and president Venture Catalysts, said, “Flickstree’s core technology is an AI powered video recognition technology that watches videos in-screen like human beings. The patent pending technology generates keywords for each video and gathers video popularity, sentiment and engagements on Internet."
