National, February 22, 2024: Bengaluru-based community-driven social networking and socialization-tech platform Oopar Club has raised ₹5 Million in its maiden pre-seed funding round led by startup community-builder PedalStart. The pre-seed round also witnessed participation from angel investor Ankitt Jain, Co-Founder, Paper Arizona. Prior to this, the startup had remained bootstrapped since its inception in 2022.
Oopar Club is building a first-of-its-kind community-based ecosystem that enables adults to make real friends (by connecting and bonding with like-minded people), socialize and live life to the fullest, and maximize their personal growth – all at the same time, via one single platform. The startup, with a strong focus on technology, gamification and community engagement initiatives, is committed to solving the growing challenge of urban loneliness, isolation, and stagnant personal growth, especially amongst today’s young and middle-aged working professionals across tier 1 and tier 2 cities of India.
Having already established a strong proof of concept (POC), Oopar Club will be allocating the newly-acquired pre-seed capital towards upgrading their technology and flagship platform, talent acquisition for core team building, as well as increasing their user base and accelerating overall growth. Bolstered by the fundraise, the startup is looking to ramp up its paid community memberships to at least 10x over the next one year, while expanding its offline operations across 20+ Indian cities.
Speaking on the fundraise, Sagar Agrawal, Pragya Srivastava and Sourabh Akash, Co-Founders of Oopar Club said, “We are delighted to announce our pre-seed fundraise, and we’re super excited to partner with all our investors to solve together the growing problem of urban isolation in our country. We at Oopar Club are laser-focused on enabling a superlative quality of social life in a bid to ensure that all of us can thrive personally and socially; and to that end, we curate our club members and design a plethora of activities and experiences for them every month to foster meaningful conversations and connections. This funding round not only offers a great validation to our steady execution so far, but also provides a major boost to our tech, product and community at large. Going ahead, we will be curating more and more offline experiences and activities, as we continue to strengthen our community and its shared goals. Also, we have multiple game-changing initiatives ready to be rolled out in the upcoming months, including a personalized communication engine for our club members, that we believe shall significantly enhance overall happiness and fulfilment for our community members”.
“At a time when the loneliness epidemic is looming and emerging as a major threat to the mental and emotional well-being of youngsters across India, Oopar Club has adapted a brilliant innovative approach to solving this critical societal issue and ensuring that every individual can have access to a happening and productive social life. We at PedalStart were particularly impressed by the founders’ vision and dedication in solving the urban loneliness paradox, and could also see their consistent efforts vis-à-vis making it easier and fun for people to make new friends as an adult. We look forward to extending our continued support to Oopar Club to help them grow faster and scale effortlessly”, commented Manas Pal and Aditya Darolia, Co-Founders of PedalStart.
Speaking about their association with the PedalStart, Sagar Agarwal, Pragya Srivastava and Sourabh Akash, Co-Founders of Oopar Club added, “As our accelerator, PedalStart has played an extremely important role in helping us in iterating the business model and continuously identifying and overcoming upcoming challenges in advance. Their experienced mentorship sessions have been a great support in our journey of building Oopar Club, and their awesome community has also helped us connect with fellow founders and identify potential partnership opportunities. As we grow, we look forward to the continued association, guidance and mentorship with and from PedalStart”.
These days, with the growing trend of migrating to new cities for jobs, combined with hectic, stressful, and (often) sedentary professional lives, most of us have been forced to put our social lives entirely on hold, or have limited it to interacting only with our colleagues from work, which in turn has exacerbated the growing concern of loneliness and isolation among young Indians. A recent study ranks India amongst the top three nations globally in terms of loneliness prevalence in adults. This is where the Oopar Club comes in and is aiming to make a positive difference, by providing individuals with a perfect antidote to urban loneliness in the form of a range of activities designed to help them unwind, socialize with the community over personal growth, and pursue their personal goals. Whereas with its flagship mobile app – currently available on both Android and iOS – Oopar is attempting to keep the tribe virtually connected and engaged over shared interests like reading, fitness, travelling, and so on. The app also rewards users for socializing and performing healthy habits on a regular basis.