Lokal App

The Lokal team has been expanded to 100 employees, and the app has been downloaded six million times, with a user base of 4.5 million users from across 25-plus districts in the three states of India. Understanding and fulfilling the user needs was the biggest factor that helped us reaching this milestone.

In 2019 Lokal raised $3 million from 3one4 Capital, Y Combinator, RB Investments, SOMA Capital and existing investor India Quotient. The organisation used the round of funding to scale further and better the current product based on user learnings from rural India and soon reached 4M Indian users.

Launched Lokal as an Android App on Play Store. Now Lokal provides local news, classifieds, matrimony advertisements, and job listings, besides other important information in Telugu and Tamil languages, to mobile users of Tier-II and III towns, and villages of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu in India. Identifying the lack of non-english content for the internet users and identifying its problems helped Lokal to be formed.

We started a WhatsApp group to distribute local news sourced from a stringer in Kodad, a village in Telangana and that whatsapp group quickly became popular among the users at that time we realize this is something that can taken forward and expanded to solve users needs.

Created a news aggregator platform TheSoup to fight the problem of Fake News which was rampant on the web. But product did not last long as it was built without understanding user needs.

After TheSoup failed, the we realised that most users in Tier II and III cities were still heavily relying on newspapers, as unlike news apps and television channels, newspapers carried a lot of local news, and relied on stringers to source these stories. However, they were limited to pages and were not timely. This is when the we tried to build a platform that would address both these challenges while focusing on providing hyperlocal news.