3 month old reward-based ad platform Ladooo claims to have given away $50K, looking to raise funds

Airloyal's reward-based ad platform Ladooo, which was launched around three months ago, claims to have already achieved profitability. The startup further claims that it has given away rewards worth $50,000 to its users through roughly 30 brands that engage with its platform. The platform gives away up to 50 per cent of what it gets from advertisers, Raja Navith Hussain, co-founder of Airloyal told TechCircle.in.

Simply put, when a user installs Ladooo and engages with its clients, they earn money in their wallet (within the application) with which they can recharge their mobile phones. The app mainly targets prepaid mobile users, which according to the founder accounts for more than 95 per cent of the mobile subscribers.

"For Ladooo, 15 to 25 year old students or first-time job holders is a big market in India and a lot of advertisers such as new app advertisers, e-commerce sites, apparels brands, movies, fashion brands, and the FMCG industry want to reach them," said Hussain.

"We are an effective platform for the advertisers to reach out to these users since we can target them based on geography, device type, demographic and past interests," he added.

Backed by Australian entrepreneur and investor Zhenya Tsvetnenko, Airloyal was founded in August 2013 by Hussain and Nithyanandan Radhakrishnan to gain a dominant share in the $18 billion per year mobile advertising market. The startup claims that its app Ladooo registers several thousand new users every day- with more than 40 per cent daily retention. The app supports all leading telecom operators like Airtel, Aircel, BSNL, MTNL, Idea, Loop Mobile, MTS, Reliance, Tata Docomo, Tata Indicom, Uninor, Videocon, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone.

Some of its clients include Goibibo, TicketGoose, iPlay, Cleartrip, Flipkart, Quikr, The Times Group, Vodafone India and Bharti Airtel, among others.

The Bangalore-based startup has about seven employees. It had also recently hired former BoxTV's (Times Internet's online video service) business head Pandurang Nayak as its chief of products.

The company plans to launch its service in a couple of Southeast Asian countries before the end of the third quarter of 2014, and is looking to raise funds for the same.

It is also working on a lot of new features both on the front end as well as the server side including multiple language support, self-care ad management portal for advertisers, data insights platform, and superior targeting capabilities, among others. The company competes with Jana.com.