We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Crater.Club, an innovative new live streaming and monetization platform for creators and educators.
Crater.Club marries the best of Twitch and LinkedIn, reinventing upskilling and networking for today’s digital natives. The current round of $500k was opened up exclusively for Lumikai as an addition to the $700k raised by the company earlier this year from LC Nueva and strategic angels, closing the company’s seed raise at $1.2M.
Today most professional learning still happens via catalogued courses and static video, which provide only a one-way format of communication and limited interactivity. As professional millennials who moved back to India from the US, Crater.Club founders Vivan and Vignesh experienced first-hand the challenge of learning from and accessing expert creators and educators.
With an intent to solve this, Vivan and Vignesh are re-imagining the creator economy for professionals ground up, applying core lessons from the best gaming and interactive streaming platforms to provide a completely new experience for professionals looking to manage and monetize their communities with a focus on authenticity.
Crater.Club provides live streaming and auctions as an innovative way for creators and educators to deepen their engagement with their audience. The platform allows creators and educators to interact live and sell access to their exclusive content and time via the auction of tokens. Drawing inspiration from the rising success of live-streaming platforms such as Twitch and Loco — Crater.Club provides a seamless end-to-end solution for distribution, engagement, and monetization for creators and educators working in professional fields such as stock trading, design, finance, marketing, and career guidance.
We’ve witnessed first-hand how live streaming fundamentally shifted the consumption of gaming content globally. A similar shift is being observed for networking and professional development. Crater.Club lies at the confluence of interactive communities, live-streaming and creator monetization. This allows for integrated real-time gratification along with interactive engagement mechanisms; converting professional development into an experience.
India’s creator economy has seen extraordinary tailwinds, with live social experiences leading the way. Lumikai’s 2021 gaming & interactive media report highlighted that India’s live-streaming platforms are seeing 100% year-on-year (YoY) growth in revenues through tipping and gifting. Average order values (AOV) in India already range from $4–10 for live streaming. The report survey found that 17% of Indian audiences already pay for virtual tipping and gifting. Overall, virtual tipping accounts for 30% of the total revenue for live streaming platforms. Further, given that consumers watching live video are engaged 10–20 times longer than on-demand content (Source: IBM) and with course completion rates at a mere 5–15%, there is an opportunity for live streaming platforms such as Crater to be disruptive.
Crater.Club also offers a full-stack approach for building professional communities, providing detailed analytics for creators to find relevant insights into user behaviours, offering ways to passively engage their audience. These insights allow streamers to refine and curate their offerings, providing the most valuable insights to their community.
The Crater team aims to launch the auctions system by mid-Jan for creators and educators to monetize their audience; while providing young millennials with a way to gain access to exclusive content as well as to the creators and educators they follow. The beta was launched on October 15th, 2021- and since then they have hosted 300+ streams, acquired 8k+ users, seeing a creator retention rate of 86% and a stream completion rate of greater than 75%.
Vivan and Vignesh exemplify sheer passion and an understanding to build for today’s millennials and GenZ. Their true grit and enthusiasm attest for the same.
At Lumikai, we believe that systems of interactivity hold the key to disrupting a wide range of legacy digital media. We’re thrilled to support the Crater.Club team and support their mission to reinvent the future of professional upskilling & networking.
Get in touch: hello@lumikai.com