Social media firm Snapchat is setting up its first sales and support team in India in partnership with ad tech firm Tyroo, a Smile Group company.

Under the agreement, Tyroo will manage sales and support for all Snapchat products in India and their revenue management. The company is setting up a team of 40 people to build ad revenue strategy for Snapchat in India and to support marketers.

Snapchat has over 9 million users in India.

“Snapchat offers a totally differentiated value proposition for marketers. First, the platform is already fairly strong in India, with a large chunk of its 119 million users coming from the country. Second, while other platforms were created around text and now pivoting towards images abs videos, Snapchat was built around these areas and therefore is a natural fit for video and image based ad content,” Siddharth Puri, CEO, Tyroo, told BusinessLine .

“Our strong local presence will help support Snapchat’s mission in India. Snapchat is at the forefront of advances in augmented reality as well as performance advertising, and we are eager to bring these offerings to the Indian market,” Puri said.

Tyroo has appointed Akshay Mathur as its Chief Revenue Officer to drive growth through such partnerships. Akshay has been a veteran in the Indian media industry with experience at companies such as the Bennett, Coleman & Co. (The Times of India Group), Yahoo! Inc. and start-ups like Komli Media, SVG and People Group.

“Snapchat’s innovative camera and video ad products such as Lenses, Filters, and Snap Ads make it a compelling choice for marketers. The products can address both brand uplift as well as performance, which would translate into a massive return on their investments,” Mathur said.

Online advertising business in India is estimated between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion, with over 95 per cent of that going to Google and Facebook.

Snapchat is targeting a new segment of advertising that’s aimed at consumers looking at consuming image or video content, an area that Facebook-owned Instagram dominates in the country at the moment. According to Snapchat, about 20 per cent of all its users in India, use only Snapchat for their social media interactions and that could be a sweet spot for the company with over 75 percent of online advertising in India shifting to mobile.

Geoffrey Reed, Snapchat’s Head of International Expansion, said, “This strategic partnership with Tyroo will allow us to bring Snapchat to more advertisers in India, and help them see the value in connecting with our highly engaged users through the effective ad products on the market.”

Snapchat reaches over 191 million users globally each day, including millions in India. Snapchat’s users are extremely engaged, spending an average of over 30 minutes on the app every day, and visiting the app approximately 25 times each day.

Tyroo is a Smile Group company headquartered in Gurgaon and a leader in ad-technology products, including its proprietary platform Vid.ai. Smile has successfully built digital media and consumer commerce businesses in India such as SVG, Quasar and also partnered with global corporations such as WPP, Yahoo!, AirBNB, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and more through its companies.