 "Copyright issues with fan merchandise pivoted Bluegape to visual blogging")
Sahil Baghla launched a fan merchandise store called Bluegape in 2011. The start-up created fan art with the help of 500 designers and sold the designs on online marketplaces like Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon. It also went on to raise seed funding and clocked orders worth $152,000 per month. But then it ran into the brick wall most fan merch companies eventually face: copyright infringement. Bluegape had to be shut down.
But this didn’t stop Baghla and his co-founder Ayush Varshney, classmates from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. The duo launched a new user-generated content platform within two weeks of the shut down. They pivoted.
The new Bluegape allows users to make collaborative listicles with visuals and embed them on other sites. It’s a mix of Quora and BuzzFeed – the start-up has a user-generated content creation model like that of Quora and a social media-oriented consumption model similar to that of BuzzFeed.
Today, Baghla revealed that Bluegape has secured $600,000 in funding from Times Internet, Rudy Gopalakrishnan of Fidelity and Ah! Ventures. This round comes just five months after the start-up raised a $200,000 round.
The fresh funding will be used for expanding the tech team to improve the user experience.
Bluegape's new space isn’t short on competition either. In India, the online media space has been simmering with activity. A number of sites have raised funding over the last year. Some of these include ScoopWhoop, which raised $1.6 million from Bharti Softbank; News In Shorts, which raised $24 million from Tiger Global; and Scroll, which raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Omidyar Network and New York-based Media Development Investment Fund.
However, unlike the others, Bluegape relies on user generated content and positions itself as a platform for social interaction.
This has been sourced from Tech in Asia. You can access the article here.