Social networking platform Slick raises $1.6 million in funding

The funding round also saw participation by a clutch of angel investors, including Sumit Gupta (Founder, CoinDCX), and others.

The company said the funding will be used to enhance Slick’s user experience, drive innovation, and develop cutting-edge features to attract more users.

Founded by IIT Bombay graduates Archit Nanda and Rachit Bansal, the social networking platform primarily focuses on GenZ.

Since launching in December, the platform said it has gained over 1 million users, spread across 5,000 schools and colleges in India.

Prior to this, Slick had raised $500,000 last year in a round led by Unacademy’s founders (Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, and Hemesh Singh) and other angel investors, including Cred’s Kunal Shah, Sujeet Kumar, and early-stage VCs Titan Capital and Blume Founders Fund.

Discover the stories of your interest

“One of the fundamental problems seen with today’s social networks is their business model of ads, which dilutes networking and shifts users’ focus to consuming content,” CEO Archit Nanda said, in the statement announcing the funding. “These platforms ultimately want more timeshare from their users, in ways that are not networking, which defies the very idea of a social network.”“Driven by TikTok, all other major platforms have prioritised algorithmic feeds over social/chronological feeds and now with the advancement in GenAI, we think soon even content will be created algorithmically,” said Rohit Krishna of WEH Ventures, in the same statement. “However, there’s a still a strong innate need to keep in touch with people and that’s why we believe this is the right time to build new social products, where the paradigm for monetisation could be very different from when Snap/Facebook started.”