Student Run Startup Plutus raises Pre-Seed of $280K from Campus Fund, India’s only student-first VC and others

Bangalore : Plutus, a creator-first platform building business and financial infrastructure for creators, announced their pre-seed round of funding from Campus Fund and other Investors including CIIE – IIM Ahmedabad, Shruti (Co-founder, ApnaKlub) and Alagu Preiyannan (Co-founder, Bluejeans).

Started by Karata Dasmahapatra (dropout from Dartmouth); Shivanshu Tyagi (student at IIT Kanpur) and Sambhav Jain (student at BITS Pilani) – Plutus focuses on deepening interactions between creators and their fans through a mix of community games both live and hypercasual. They work with over 3k+ creators across India, along with a waitlist of 10k+ creators. The start-up is seeing strong user love with a 35% month over month userbase growth and an 86% Net Promoter Score (NPS). Plutus intends to use the fundraise to deepen partnerships with creators and fans, while also building new tools to expand the monetisation potential.

The creator economy is growing at a CAGR of 25-30% and is one of the fastest growing sectors today. Creators, especially ones that fall in the category of being micro-influencers don’t earn a stable income through ad revenue, since this is largely contingent upon the number of views, followers and subscribers to their content. While social media platforms have evolved, the experience across them remains the same – creators make content, fans consume the content. “This is where Plutus has changed the norm by building a single platform with two-way flow of content via live rooms, group chats, creator led games, integrated payments and analytics. With an innovative pay-as-you-go structure, creators are able to earn more than subscriptions or workshops from their user base, and in some cases more than advertiser promotions. With this fundraise Plutus aims to expand across India and South East Asia, and launch new set of hyper-casual games and features.”, said Karata Dasmahapatra, Co-Founder & CEO, Plutus

With a 35% M-o-M growth in userbase and strong engagement rate, Plutus wants to become the go-to tool for Gen-Z creators. While creators are seeing a significant uptick in their monthly income, Plutus continues to build additional avenues for creators and fans to engage.

Shlok Vora, Student Associate at Campus Fund and part of the Plutus deal team highlighted, “What impressed us most is that the Plutus team has always been nimble in innovating new features for creators to connect better with their fans. The creator economy is at an inflection point and Plutus is positioned really well to potentially become the Shopify for creators.”