INFLUISH Raises Pre‑Seed Funding at ₹25 Crore Valuation to Build India's Unified Creator Economy Platform

India's creator economy has a fragmentation problem. Creators juggle separate tools for audience growth, brand outreach, content analytics, payments and collaboration, often relying on agencies that inflate engagement metrics using paid boosts and other tactics that obscure actual performance. INFLUISH, a Udaipur‑based creator platform founded in 2026, was built to fix that, and has now closed a pre‑seed funding round at a valuation of ₹25 crore ($2.6 million) to accelerate the build.

The round was backed by angel investors including Pankaj Vermani, co‑founder of lingerie brand Clovia, alongside Jeetendra Tewani and Sachin Harneja. The amount raised was not disclosed. INFLUISH is also the first startup in the CoFounder Circle Accelerator, a venture‑building platform founded by entrepreneur Darpan Sanghvi, adding ecosystem support alongside the angel capital.

What INFLUISH Is Building

The platform was founded by Sankalp Nag, Tushar Jain and Shivani Rajora, all college dropouts who built the business from Udaipur before the round positioned them for wider expansion. Their thesis is that creators need more than a marketplace that matches them with brands for individual campaigns. What they actually need is infrastructure: tools for verified performance data, audience growth, education, monetisation, collaboration management and payments, all in one place rather than assembled from a patchwork of third‑party apps and agency relationships.

INFLUISH's approach to verification is worth noting in particular. The platform is built on official Meta APIs rather than scraped or self‑reported data, which means the engagement and performance metrics it surfaces to brands and agencies are authenticated rather than gamed. This matters because the fake metrics problem in influencer marketing has been significant enough to erode trust among brands that allocate budget to creator campaigns. By anchoring performance data to the Meta API layer, INFLUISH positions itself as a trustworthy infrastructure partner rather than just another discovery marketplace.

The platform currently has over five lakh creators onboarded, a number that reflects organic traction built without paid customer acquisition. Nag has noted that growth came through viral content and organic funnels spanning social media to app downloads, which means the business was already profitable at the time of the pre‑seed raise. Month‑on‑month revenue growth has been running at approximately 50% and the company uses a subscription model, with an initial annual entry fee that transitions to a monthly plan once creators are embedded in the platform's ecosystem.

Investor Conviction and Backing

Pankaj Vermani's involvement brings direct‑to‑consumer brand‑building expertise to the table at a moment when INFLUISH is preparing to significantly expand its brand and agency‑facing toolset. His comment on the investment reflects the thesis clearly: the next wave of value creation in the creator economy will come from platforms that go beyond brand collaborations and build comprehensive ecosystems where creators can grow, learn, earn and manage their professional trajectory. Vermani specifically highlighted the team's execution and their understanding of creator needs as the deciding factors.

The CoFounder Circle Accelerator affiliation, founded by Darpan Sanghvi, the entrepreneur behind MyGlamm and Good Glamm Group, adds strategic context. Sanghvi built one of India's most aggressive direct‑to‑consumer content‑to‑commerce platforms before pivoting, and the experience of that journey is embedded in the accelerator model he now runs. For a creator‑economy platform that is trying to bridge content, commerce and infrastructure, the mentorship context is unusually well matched.

The Market Backdrop

India's creator economy is expanding at a pace that makes the market context for INFLUISH straightforwardly compelling. The country has one of the world's largest populations of social media users, a rapidly growing cohort of full‑time content creators, and a brand marketing ecosystem that is shifting significant spend from traditional digital advertising to creator‑led campaigns. The problem is that the infrastructure serving this market remains immature, dominated by fragmented tools, unverified metrics, and agencies whose business models depend on opacity rather than transparency.

INFLUISH's target is ₹100 crore in annual recurring revenue by December 2027, a figure that implies substantial scaling from current levels but is consistent with the 50% month‑on‑month growth rate the company has reported. The capital will be deployed toward product development and technology infrastructure, specifically stronger brand and agency dashboards, expanded creator growth tools, enhanced platform capabilities, and deepening the AI‑powered utility layer that helps creators manage and grow their presence more efficiently.

The startup's combination of pre‑existing profitability, organic user acquisition, verified data infrastructure and category‑defining ambition makes it an unusual story at the pre‑seed stage. In a market where most creator platforms either focus narrowly on matchmaking or try to be everything without the technology to back it up, INFLUISH is building toward the unified operating system for the Indian creator economy that does not yet exist.