Hindi social networking site ShabdaNagari has raised $200,000 in funding led by Kanpur Angels and other unnamed investors on Friday.
The money will be utilised to expand operations and enhance user interface, according to the portal, said VCCCircle.
ShabdaNagari will remain a non-subscription portal, according to its website, which claims to have 12,000 users.
The portal was launched by IIT Mumbai alumni Amitesh Mishra along with Kalpnesh Gupta and Nikhil Tiwari in 2015, and is run by Trident Analytical Solutions Pvt Ltd, a Kanpur-based company.
The company, which was incubated at IIT Kanpur, is mentored by Kanpur Angels' president Gopal Sutwala.
"With ShabdaNagari, we want to bring together Hindi speakers online where they can connect with like-minded people and express their thoughts in their language," Gupta said, VCCircle said.
There is no information about its business model or user profile. The portal aims to bridge the digital divide that exists in the Hindi-speaking regions of the country.
"In the online space today, Hindi doesn't feature even in top 10 languages despite being one of most popular languages. We have a goal of bridging this digital divide. The angel investment will give us the boost and confidence to grow ShabdaNagari into one of the largest social networking platform in the country," said Kalpnesh Gupta, reported DealStreetAsia.
Start-ups have been seeing significant traction in terms of fund-raising since the beginning of this year, with Ratan Tata investing in four start-ups in the past 22 days. These include FirstCry, Tracxn Technologies, DogSpot and CashKaro.
On Friday, Japan's SoftBank announced an investment of $15 million in online property listing start-up Housing.com, taking SoftBank's total investment in the portal to about $100 million.
India has about 4,200 start-ups, according to software industry body Nasscom.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's launched a new initiative, "Start-up India" on 16 January to give a fresh impetus to Indian start-ups and also announced sops including setting up of a Rs 10,000 crore fund.
