Vernacular content platform Gifskey has raised Rs 7 crore from Kstart, the seed fund of Kalaari Capital, and a clutch of early-stage funds including Whiteboard Capital, WEH Ventures, AngelList and Touchstone Equities.

The Hyderabad-based startup provides GIFs, emojis and stickers in eight Indian languages including Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Marathi, and Bengali and is compatible with all keyboards and consumer apps including WhatsApp, ShareChat and Dailyhunt. Gifskey provides an API for third-party integrations.

“While every B2C product is fighting the battle to be the most used app for the next 500M internet users, Gifskey is in the unique position of working with all smartphones and B2C apps to enable their users to have a higher engagement with their user generated Gifs, which are very contextual,” said Revant Bhate, partner at Kstart.

Founded by Mahesh Gogineni, Manan Maheshwari and Varun MS, alumni of BITS Pilani, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and the London School of Economics, the team in 2016 sold their on-demand beauty and wellness services startup Zapluk to Quikr.

“Mobile users preferring regional language content are growing tremendously in India, and we believe that this is the right time to build a technology first platform delivering fresh, relevant and trending content,” said Gogineni. The financing will be used to enhance the technology of the platform, he said.

Globally GIFs and emojis have become popular and a natural extension of language especially with younger audiences. Last year, Google acquired mobile GIF keyboard and search engine Tenor for an undisclosed amount.

With an online population of 500 million in 2017, India has one of the fastest growing internet populations in the world. A 2017 report by KPMG and Google noted 9 out of 10 new internet users between 2016 and 2021 will use local languages.