New Delhi-based visual blogging platform bluegape has raised $600,000 (₹4 crore) from a clutch of investors, including ah! Ventures and Times Internet, which the company will use for expansion plans.

In this round, Fidelity Ventures Executive Rudy Gopalakrishnan also made an investment in his personal capacity.

bluegape is a start-up founded in 2011 by IIT-Kanpur alumni Sahil Baghla and Ayush Varshney as a fan merchandising store. In January this year, the company, which is backed by Indian start-up accelerator TLabs, transformed into a visual blogging platform (a blog using images, videos and text).

“This is a bridge capital investment, and it will be used to technology upgradation and strengthening our engineering team. We will also use a part of investments for building a mobile app,” Baghla told BusinessLine .

In April, ah! Ventures and Rudy Gopalakrishnan had invested $184,000 in bluegape. The company has now raised a total $1.1 million till date.

Barclays Capital India advised bluegape on the deal, which was closed on ah! Ventures’ equity investment platform CLUBah.com.

“Visual blogging is the next big thing in the social media space, and we see a lot of opportunities emerging in this space,” said Harshad Lahoti, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at ah! Ventures.

Additional funding

The start-up is also looking at raising venture capital funds, with an announcement expected in the next 5-6 months. However, the quantum of investments is yet to be decided, Baghla said.

On its part, ah! Ventures is in the final stages of closing two more deals in the coming weeks, Lahoti said, without disclosing the details.

Banking on data, bluegape enables users to create and consume content in a visual format.

At present, the company has more than 15 million unique visitors and about 100,000 posts are created on the platform every month.

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