Pune Boy Raises Rs 7.5 Crore In Pre-Seed Funding For His Startup Un1Feed To Help Users Fully Control Social Media Feed

Hardik Patil

Hardik Patil

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Pune, 13th January 2021: Un1Feed, a San Francisco Bay Area-based tech startup started by two Indian college dropouts recently received a pre-seed fundraising round of over Rs 7.5 crore ($1 million). The startup, Unifeed stylised as Un1Feed, is a platform that allows users to override and edit the social feed algorithm.

Hardik Patil (19) from Pune and Ansh Nanda (20) from Delhi were both previously executives at KiranaKart/Zepto, where they met each other and led operations and products respectively. After working on Un1Feed for a few months, they decided to drop out of Stanford and Duke University respectively to pursue the startup full-time.

Ansh Nanda
Ansh Nanda

Patil, a resident of Aundh, passed the 10th board exam from Vidya Valley School in 2018 and completed International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) from Singapore International School, Mumbai. He got admission to Stanford University, California (USA) to pursue a Bachelor’s Degree in Management Science & Engineering. However, he opted for a gap year to pursue entrepreneurial ambitions. His father Deepak Patil is posted as regional transport officer (RTO) in Kolhapur, while his mother Vaishali Patil is a businesswoman.

“People of my age spend over 20% of their waking life on social media, with almost no control over the kind of content they consume. In just the past year, nearly half of my generation has attempted to delete their social media account”, said Hardik Patil, founder and co-CEO.

Un1Feed’s mission is to help Gen Z be more intentional about the 3+ hours/day they spend on social media by allowing them to fully customize how their social feed is displayed, ranked, and contextualized on any existing social network.

The startup raised venture capital from some of the leading investors in Silicon Valley, including Ali Partovi (serial entrepreneur and early investor in Airbnb, Facebook, Uber, Dropbox), Tribe Capital, and Jon Oringer (founder of Shutterstock).

Un1Feed makes use of newly popularized blockchain technology to securely store and handle user data. The platform lets users transfer their digital social identity seamlessly across different apps. VC investments in consumer crypto startups have been on the uptick, and Un1Feed is the latest company to realize a new application of this hot technology.

“Unfortunately, the blockchain/crypto space is still too technical for most of the world. We want to allow the majority of users to easily gain the many benefits of web3, like the ease through which they can monetize almost everything they do for free in Web 2.0, without any technical experience”, said founder and co-CEO Ansh Nanda.

He added that they’re now expanding their team by hiring engineers and expect to launch to the public in a few months.

Explaining the functioning of social media, Hardik informed, “Instagram users have a love/hate relationship with Instagram, and we want to change that because, under the hood, faceless algorithms optimize exclusively for ad revenue. And yet, users are locked into these platforms because that’s where everyone is. Un1Feed dismantles a social network’s lock on network effects and puts the user first.”

Pre-seed Fundraise
Un1Feed recently raised a pre-seed round of $1M (INR 7.5Cr) led by Neo, a Silicon Valley-based community-focused venture capital fund, whose network includes more than 400 tech industry figures including founders of Airbnb, Stripe and Zoom. Other investors include Tribe Capital, Great Oaks, Global Asset Capital, and notable angels like Shutterstock founder Jon Oringer, Misfits Market founder Edward Lando, and social media entrepreneur Cory Levy. Un1Feed plans to focus on product development, and is now looking to hire engineers to ramp up the pace!