India’s homegrown social polling app Whatsay launched

MUMBAI: With a hope to touch one million downloads over the next one year, Neuv Private Limited has launched India’s first-ever free mobile social polling application called Whatsay. The app allows users to create and send visual polls across 25 categories to their friends through WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. The company is also contemplating to raise Rs 3 crore to fund its social polling app. Whatsay is available on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.

"Whatsay  is a social polling app that makes polls lively and fun to share. It is the perfect mobile companion for Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. Create a poll on Whatsay and immediately tweet it, share it on your Facebook wall or to a WhatsApp group,” said Raghu Bathina, Co-founder, Whatsay App at its launch.

“India’s Internet growth trajectory is very exciting for us, 65% of the 232 million internet users in India are connecting via mobile. All these users can leverage Whatsay,” he added. According to Bathina, the company has proved that visual content is more likely to be viewed and shared on social media. Visual tweets are retweeted 35% more than text and 87% of Facebook shares are photos.

Neuv was co-founded by Raghu Bathina, a serial entrepreneur who grew and sold two of his previous ventures — QuickTree Inc to Citrix and Ramp Networks to Nokia, and Sridhar Gadhi, a first-generation entrepreneur and CMD of $100 million-Paradigm Group.

Neuv was incubated at Paradigm Group and received Rs 2 crore in an angel round from the group in 2014. While the startup’s first product Doodly Doo, a personal messages app, has already seen half-a-million downloads, Bathina said the company was expecting a million downloads for Whatsay in a year from now.

The company is contemplating to raise Rs 3 crore to fund its social polling mobile application Whatsay, even as it is exploring ways to monetize the app. “Monetization is not what we are looking for in the near-term. At present, our focus is on building traction for Whatsay,” Bathina said, adding the company was weighing various options, including helping companies build brand equity while engaging with their target audience, to create recurring revenue streams.