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Pulse is a social networking app that enables users to stay connected with college/school communities around them in a fun and visual way

Pulse Co-founder Prakhar Khanduja

Pulse, a social networking app that enables you to stay connected with college/school communities around you in a fun and visual way, has raised US$500,000 in pre-Series A funding from SAIF Partners.

With the freshly raised funds, Pulse aims to expand its presence to cities such as Pune, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Manipal, Chennai, Hyderabad and to ramp up its technology team.

Pulse, a product of Instalively Livestreaming, was launched in October 2016 by IIT Roorkee alumni Karthik Vaidyanath and Prakhar Khanduja.

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The core idea behind the app was to create a platform for the millennials, where they would not only consume content that is locally relevant to them, but also create and share it with a very geo-specific community.

Pulse is a local sharing app that lets you post your life in pictures and videos to your very own college stream, and hare with all your college mates instantly. With one tap, you can see what people in your campus are up to and show off your campus life to others.

Just click a picture or a video, add you college/society sticker tap on send, and select your college/school, and it gets instantly shared with everyone in your campus even when you’re offline.

“Typical broadcasting social networks like Facebook and Twitter have limited users posting daily as it’s a public broadcast to the world with limited privacy. Contrary to broadcasting, through our elaborate on-ground market research, we realised that by narrowcasting to the relevant audience within and across nearby colleges, and giving the content hyperlocal relevance, it greatly boosted content interactions as well as significantly reduced the inhibition of users for content creation. Hyperlocal social networking and narrowcasting is the next wave of social networking,” said Vaidyanath.

The app utilises minimal internet bandwidth and one can view content as well as post completely offline, according to Pulse.

Pulse claims to have roped in most of the major colleges around the Delhi-NCR area through its community programme.

“The inception of Pulse happened when my nephew told me how he misses out on events in his college. That’s when we went on ground for three months and met over 5,000 kids from various colleges and schools across India to understand how they think. Then we got a few of them to work with us for a few weeks and we collectively came out with all the features with them,” said Khanduja.

“This exercise also showed us how users today quickly prefer adding a sticker to their pictures to express their emotions over typing a caption, which itself is a huge market. And with the feedback we’ve got, Pulse has made content creation more intuitive for users. Pulse is the first consumer app in India which is made by the college kids and for the college kids,” he added.

Pulse had earlier raised US$500,000 seed funding from SAIF. Prior to that it received capital from eminent Angel Investors such as Rajan Anandan, Rajesh Sawhney, Anupam Mittal, Uday Shankar (CEO, StarTV), Anand Chandrasekaran and Amit Ranjan.

The startup is currently in talks with investors in India, China and the US for a larger round.

The post SAIF bets on Pulse, an app that works like Facebook did in 2004 appeared first on e27.

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