Lokal wants to build internet afresh for the non-metro user
The company's verticalised approach to deliver online services in native languages sets it apart from the race to become India's super-app
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Last Updated: Oct 27, 2025, 13:46 IST6 min
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The journey of regional social media and services platform Lokal since 2018 is reflective of India’s internet journey beyond the metros. Incorporated in 2018, Lokal has grown from being an Indic-language hyperlocal content and information app, to running classifieds and now launching apps for services in different languages.
“The first stage of the internet is for low-commitment content consumption, followed by classifieds and connecting with each other, and as more investment goes into building infrastructure such as payment gateways etc, the internet becomes ubiquitous,” says Jani Pasha, co-founder and CEO at Lokal.
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The idea for Lokal started with making the internet accessible to people beyond metros in their own language. Pasha, hailing from Kodad in Telangana, and Vipul Chaudhary, who hails from Bhilwara in Rajasthan, were introduced through common friends while they were working for other companies.
“Back then, we believed that, with Jio, the internet will become ubiquitous. But the language barrier existed and the gateway to build that would be with content in native languages. And the gap that existed around the time was what was happening in the towns or locality of the user,” says Pasha, adding that this led them to build a hyperlocal social media app in native language to get to a critical density of users interacting with the platform on a daily basis.
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Once the density was achieved, Lokal launched its classifieds services with jobs, matrimony and other offerings around 2021. Over the last two years, with the adoption of UPI, Lokal has verticalised its classified products and runs a bouquet of 53 apps across categories like social media, jobs, matrimony, agriculture consulting, astrology, edutainment content, wellness, career and finance in 10 different languages.
While it might be counter-intuitive for an app to send users from the main platform to other apps, Pasha believes the approach is better suited to Lokal’s use case than creating a super-app. “The initial dream was to create a localised super-app and four years of my journey was spent obsessing about this. However, we realised the user was struggling as the infrastructure was not built that way,” says Pasha.
He adds that the description of an app on the app store is limited to one category or the other, requiring the app to spend money on customer education for use cases. Second, managing notifications in bundled super-apps can be distracting, as each user’s engagement requirement is different. Another reason for the super-app not working for the Tier 2, 3 audience is the need for access, followed by ease of navigation—a use case often overlooked by large social media entities building for the urban population.
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“All experimentation and critical mass happen on our classifieds app today and once we are confident that the use case is big enough to benefit users through a dedicated app is when we verticalise it,” says Pasha.
He gives the example of matrimony as a use-case for localised users. “The apps that exist today are mainly ₹4,000 to ₹5,000 ARPU (average revenue per user). The user in Tier 2, 3 cities and towns does not want to pay that much, and even if they can, they will start with a smaller amount. Second, people don’t want to go beyond 200 km for a match as the language and culture changes,” he says.
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To counter this, Lokal created district-specific matrimony apps in local languages like Guntur Matrimony in Telugu, with the cost for trial set at ₹99 or ₹199. Its other offerings in agriculture consulting connect farmers with experts at a small ticket size of ₹20 per session—relying on micro-transactions for the value-conscious user.
The vertical-specific approach has worked well for Lokal’s core audience, says Madhukar Sinha, founding partner at early-stage investment firm India Quotient, which backed Lokal in its seed round in 2019. The company has raised ₹238 crore from the likes of India Quotient, 3one4 Capital, Y Combinator, Tencent and Global Brain among others, and has clocked revenues of ₹67.4 crore in FY25.
“The great part about Lokal is the verticalised, pay-per-use product rather than an algorithmic, platform-driven approach, which is monopolised by seasoned and technologically advanced companies like Facebook and YouTube,” says Sinha. “The approach taken by Lokal requires on-the-ground work, and any competitor entering the space will take time to build that.”
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Lokal has taken a modular approach to be able to launch multiple apps in a short time, creating core technology for supply-demand matching and creating a specific user interface on top of these.
While India is typically considered a numbers or DAU (daily active user)/MAU (monthly active user) market with lower propensity to pay for services, Lokal’s micro-payments approach has worked well for its target customer base.
“It is not fair to say that India is not a transacting market. We are a DAU/MAU market due to the sheer number of people. Even if 1 percent of these users pay and use your app daily, it is a strong use case,” says Anurag Ramdasan, partner at 3one4 Capital and an early investor in Lokal.
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3one4 Capital has also backed other Indic language apps like Kuku FM and Seekho.
Ramdasan adds what is more important for Indian apps is retention and daily session times and referrals. “It makes more sense to scale if 500,000 people are using your app for an hour, versus 10 million using it for a minute or two. The value is much higher.”
With a 10 million MAU base, it is natural that Lokal has a range of content coming from users, in addition to what’s available on the app. Pasha says Lokal uses AI-based moderation, human-assisted moderation as well as user-reports to take down objectionable content.
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“The core team size is around 130 but we work with a team of 550 where moderators and customer support make for the bulk of the function. User trust is important for what we are building and if the user loses trust, the churn is easy,” adds Pasha.
Lokal’s majority user base interacts in Telugu followed by a strong base in Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. Some of its apps are also live in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi and Bengali.
He adds that Lokal’s apps are also compliant with The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules of 2021 and it carries out periodic third-party audits to meet content moderation guidelines.
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Since raising a fresh round of $14.6 million earlier this year, Lokal is investing heavily in AI for content moderation, increasing net productivity and to bridge the gap for supply of qualified experts across its apps. The AI investments and trials will be core to the company’s roadmap over the next six to 12 months, says the CEO.
“We are investing in building AI experts so that it bridges the gap on the supply side—with voice first. It solves for 24x7 availability of an expert and can help a human expert improve their service with help from the AI assistants. We are running pilots internally to train these AI assistants on data available with us and public data,” says Pasha, adding that the AI assistants are likely to go live by January 2026.
Whether people pay for these AI assistants will be determined in the trials. “If there is enough value in it, users might pay the AI assistants but the propensity to pay will likely be less than humans,” says Pasha.
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First Published: Oct 27, 2025, 12:01
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