Privyplex strengthens bonds between celebrities and fans

The mobile-first celebrity on-demand startup Privyplex is in talks with about half a dozen celebrities across the world from different fields: sports, arts, Bollywood, and later this year, it will announce partnerships with top international celebrities coming on-board.

Privy comes from the French word ‘privé’ (which means private, intimate) and ‘plex’ referring to the ecosystem/units forming that private relationship.

Talking to DH, Privyplex co-founder Ahmed Arab said, “We are also working on launching new products, with more innovative features to excite and engage fans, and also bringing scale to our reach. Recently, we also appointed Sujit Mishra, former vice president of products Paytm, as co-founder and chief product officer to help us scale and launch our innovations.”

When asked on how it started, Arab explained, “Upmanyu Misra and myself were batchmates in the INSEAD MBA class of 2010, and have remained close friends after graduation. Both of us had an entrepreneurial frame of mind and we frequently discussed and explored startup opportunities in different areas, in different countries around the world, including India.”

“I saw a business opportunity in celebrity-fans engagement products, both of us got together and worked to refine and enhance the idea to a far more ambitious business model — to develop digital solutions for celebrities to better engage with their fans. Once the idea and business model was in place, Upmanyu and I set up Privyplex,” Arab added. Privyplex raised an initial seed funding round of $1.2 million from Elyseum Capital Partners in 2015.

“We started exploring India as a market, given that it had the world’s largest young population, and among the most passionate fans. In India, people love cricket and bollywood. Virat Kohli’s name came up as the one of the most loved young cricketers. We initiated conversation with Virat’s managers and he loved the idea, and thus Virat FanBox was conceived,” Arab said.

“Our first product (FanBox) is a new concept of fan club membership. The entire value of the product is in enabling the fan-celebrity engagement through the app and platform element, which is where our real expertise lies. Fans have to purchase a FanBox kit, which requires a completely different set of expertise to manage: from device sourcing, production, packaging, quality assurance, and supply chain,” Arab added.

On expansion plans, Arab said, “Right now, our product is available across India. We are exploring international expansion to the Gulf (UAE, Saudi Arabia), before the end of the year and later to Southeast Asia.”

On technology strengths, Arab said, “It’s all about building our products in a smart-way, placing the user front and central in everything we do, from what service and content to offer to how such service or content will be consumed. In addition, our strength relies also on our ability to collect key user data while ensure data privacy and integrity to draw insights into the fans by building rich behavioural and usage analytics using artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data.”