Based out of Mumbai, FreeCharge, which offers discount coupons as rewards for topping up mobile-phone plans and satellite-television subscriptions, recently secured around $33 million in its second round of venture capital funding from Sequoia, Sofina and ru-Net. The funds will be used to remove bugs in the service and ramping up its marketing campaign, as per the report by International Business Times.
“We will use it to make FreeCharge a household brand ... we have just unveiled a TV campaign. Further, we will build new product lines that will solve the pain points of marketers in a way that consumers will be happy about,” CEO Alok Goel told International Business Times in an interview.
The firm claims to have registered users of about 10 million. Goel moved to Accelyst to head FreeCharge last year from another Indian startup RedBus. However, he was previously responsible for monetizing the display ad network at Google, where he spent nearly six years, according to his LinkedIn profile.
“The big picture for us, we are a very significant big data company with amazing insights into the consumer and based on those insights we are going to build advertising products,” Goel said.