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For every ad played, the user earns points which he/she can later redeem in terms of mobile recharges and bill payments

Delhi-based mobile advertising platform PayTunes has secured close to US$500,000 in pre-Series A funding from India Angel Network (IAN) and existing investor CIO Angel Network.

The company will use the investment for team expansion and marketing.

As part of funding, Vishal Khare and Rajeev Arora from IAN will join the Board of the company.

The startup was founded in June last year by IIT Delhi batchmates Divya Pratap Singh and Rakesh Sehgal. The duo was later joined by Amit Naredi as a co-founder and Chief Sales Officer.

PayTunes provides advertisers and brands a targeted medium to reach mobile consumers through audio visual ads.

For users, PayTunes is a simple app which replaces their mobile ringtones with ad jingles from advertisers and at the end of the call, a visual for same ad is also shown. For every ad played, the user earns points which he/she can redeem in terms of mobile recharges and bill payments. PayTunes also provides offers from e-commerce, shopping and other segments to earn more points.

The PayTunes founding team

For advertisers, PayTunes provides an ad platform with inbuilt ad analytics. They can selectively choose the users they want to target based on their geography, demography and other parameters, and push the ads from PayTunes’ platform’s backend dashboard through a single click.

Currently, PayTunes is working with more than 25 ad agencies across India and has run campaigns for brands such as Nissan motors, Jabardast HIT FM, Vodafone, Saavan.com and Amazon.

The company now plans to integrate an ‘ads on caller-tune’ feature, which will increase the platform’s reach multiple times and become more lucrative for advertisers.

PayTune claims to have clocked more than 400,000 downloads till date.

Earlier, PayTunes had raised US$100,000 from CIO Angel Network in September last year.

“Conventional mediums like TV and Radio lack control in terms of targeting campaigns to their target users and exposure of the ad. We are giving an entirely different and fresh method of mobile advertising, other than static banner ads which are already in practice,” said Singh.

“We use the traditional audio ad which is broadcast to the user on mobile on the incoming call, which is then combined with graphic ad to complete the audio-visual effect on the user,” he added.

As per a recent e-Marketer report, mobile ad spend has surpassed US$100 billion, which is 51 per cent of total digital ad spending and is expected to reach 70 per cent-mark by 2019. Digital advertising spend in India is approximately US$1 billion, of which mobile advertising spend is US$180 billion.

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