POPxo goes regional, launches in Marathi, Bangla, Tamil and Telugu

Eyeing to expand its user base, POPxo — an online community for women that deals with everything from fashion, beauty, lifestyle, work, etc. — has launched in Marathi, Bangla, Tamil and Telugu and will now be available in six languages, including English and Hindi. Each language vertical will have a dedicated team of writers and editors creating original content — text, video and social — focused on women.

In a study conducted by Google-KPMG, it is estimated that India today has 234 million Indian language users online, compared to 175 million English users. Further, the internet user base for regional languages will continue to grow at 18% annually to reach 536 million in the next four years, compared to the English internet user base which is expected to grow at 3% to reach 199 million. So by 2021, regional language users are expected to account for nearly 75% of India’s internet user base.

According to POPxo Founder and CEO Priyanka Gill, “The next wave of users who come online will be accessing the internet in their native languages. There is a massive supply-demand gap for female-centric regional language content.”

POPxo said the digital platform for women has over 39 million MAUs (monthly active users) in English and Hindi across all platforms. Every month, the team creates 1,500 stories and 80 videos, resulting in users spending over three million hours consuming POPxo content, the platform said.

“Expanding our language portfolio is the key in maintaining a strong growth trajectory for POPxo. Our current data-driven content model is scalable. We will use our learnings in English and Hindi to create and distribute relatable content to our new user groups,” said Ruchira Bose, Head of Content, POPxo.

POPxo has raised a total of $12m in funding to date. The last investment round was led by Neoplux and OPPO, with participation from existing investors Kalaari Capital, Chiratae Ventures, Summit Media, and GREE Ventures. POPxo launched private label commerce in July 2018.