Entertainment thumpN pre-seed round

Photo Credit: Joël Armand Amissa

Entertainment thumpN, billed as “India’s first AI-native live entertainment platform,” has officially launched in beta with a nearly $4 million pre-seed war chest at its disposal.

Mumbai-headquartered thumpN announced its public rollout and its multimillion-dollar raise earlier this week. Featuring “a team of operators who’ve spent decades in live entertainment,” the startup aims to help fans discover events in India’s quick-growing music market.

At the top level, the entity’s AI-powered chatbot, Shadow, is said to connect prospective attendees with concerts (plus different types of ticketed happenings) based on their preferences. As things stand, Shadow can make recommendations by factoring for “mood, a genre, a city, a budget,” and more, according to the appropriate website.

Meanwhile, thumpN also sells tickets on-platform and uses AI to generate “ready-to-sell event pages” for organizers, who then benefit from tailored marketing strategies and access to detailed sales data, per the same site.

(Human curators have a role on the app as well, and one can reportedly auto-create an event page in less than 10 minutes.)

Finally, the platform further supports dedicated artist profiles – “one place for fans and organisers to discover who you are and what you’re about” – and intends to release an insights dashboard “soon.”

“It learns what you love, finds shows worth your time across every platform, and pairs that with a layer of human curation from people who live and breathe live entertainment,” thumpN CEO Varun Khare summed up of the app. “A ticket here is the beginning of a relationship – not the end of a checkout flow.”

Back to the raise itself, according to The Unicorn Magazine, thumpN secured ₹357 million (currently $3.74 million) from multiple execs with Noida-based payments platform Paytm; Khare previously served as Paytm’s COO.

Likewise aboard as thumpN investors are artists Arijit Singh, Sunidhi Chauhan, and Badshah. As for what comes next – besides the aforementioned feature expansion, that is – thumpN is now looking to bring on a number of new team members.

And when speaking with Moneycontrol, Khare highlighted plans to achieve a roughly 10% live-events market share by initially prioritizing niche and exclusive happenings.

In the bigger picture, thumpN’s multimillion-dollar raise has arrived less than one month following an Ahdritz Capital-led seed round for New Delhi-headquartered distribution startup Madverse Music.

June also saw Warner Music kick off an “expansion into the Bengali music market” under a partnership with SVF Entertainment. Spotify, for its part, is working to add subscribers in India by offering three-month Premium trials to Vodafone Idea customers.