Nexus leads seed round in celebrity engagement platform Unlu

Unlu, a celebrity engagement platform that allows both consumers and brands to communicate with high-profile personalities, has raised Rs 9 crore (around $1.23 million) in a seed funding round.

The round in Delhi-based Unlu has been led by Nexus Venture Partners, the startup said in a statement. Nexus’s other portfolio companies including VenWiz, Jumbotail, Turtlemint, and Infra.Market. 

Other participants in this round include Mumbai Angels, TiE (The IndUS Entrepreneurs), and international early-stage startup accelerator Expert Dojo.

Unlu, operated by Beunlu Pvt Ltd, was set up last year by Vipul Agrawal, Himanshu Periwal, Akshay Pruthi, and Anurag Dalia. The four co-founders have worked with organisations including Amazon, ixigo, and Vokal.

The company says its platform has on-boarded over 2,000 celebrities so far, along with more than one million users. It offers several formats for celebrity engagement, including Unluclass, which is an edu-tainment platform with celebrities offering their expertise in fields such as sports and acting.

Unlu is the latest startup operating in the celebrity engagement space to raise funding. In November, Gonuts raised Rs 3.5 crore (about $471,650) in a seed funding round led by marquee angel investors Sweta Rau and Archana Priyadarshini. Other participants included 9Unicorns, AngelList, and LetsVenture.

In October, over-the-top streaming and subscription video-on-demand service ALTBalaji acquired a 17.5% stake in celebrity engagement platform Tring. The investment valued Mumbai-based Tring at Rs 100 crore (about $13.62 million), ALTBalaji said at the time.

In August, investors including upGrad co-founder Ronnie Screwvala and India-focused Saama Capital bet $4.3 million (around Rs 32 crore) on TrueFan. The celebrity engagement startup was set up by people including Nimish Goel, who has worked at Warburg Pincus.