Contributed by Rafaeel Akbar Chaudhry

Seenreport.com, a start-up that was launched by a trio in Lahore, their slogan “people powered news” has closed Series “A” round of funding from Al-Janabi Group, a leading media investor in Middle East. SeenReport is the largest citizen news portal in Pakistan and provides both users and media organization expertise in combining traditional and new media by leveraging its rich social media suite.

SeenReport’s Young CEO, Sharjeel Ahmed, says,

“We are really excited to acquire investment from Al-Janabi Group. As a prominent media venture capital firm, they bring a lot of experience and guidance to the table. Combined with the passion and expertise of SeenReport’s team in fusing traditional and new media, we will certainly achieve higher grounds.”

When talking about the way forward for the company, Sharjeel said,

“SeenReport is making a strong impact on the way news is created, shaped, distributed and perceived by the people. Traditional media has already started to embrace SeenReport’s platform. We feel that the funding is well-timed and will enable us to grow our company. We will use this funding to expand the company, strengthen the platform and explore the international market.”

Yaser Awan, the COO of SeenReport, says,

“The series A investment will really help us in taking SeenReport’s platform to a new level where we would be able to make an even better impression on Mainstream Media by promoting Live Streaming, Freedom of Expression, Citizen and Process Journalism and involving technology in bridging the gap between Internet, mobile users and common people across the globe. We would appreciate if you take this Pakistani success story (the Startup that started from zero and became a multimillion dollar company), propagate it and tell Pakistani people that we can do it. We are not terrorists; we are the flag bearers of innovation. All you need is passion and you can go out and change the world.”

Since its launch on 10 June 2008, SeenReport has made huge strides and now offers a full blown news sourcing and publishing platform. The platform is specifically geared towards gathering news via cell phones, micro-blogging and live casting. The platform supports rich multimedia content and taps into the prominent and emerging social networks and blogs in order to create a comprehensive social media suite. It provides a platform to SMS, MMS, E-Mail or directly upload our videos and photographs with short description to be published immediately directly via your cellular phones. You don’t even need to spend time registering for an account. You can however upload via cell phone or PC, the making of an account is not compulsory, if a non-account holder member uploads it would just name the source as anonymous.

SeenReport has made its mark with news sourcing platform and unique business model to provide its off-the-shelf social media suite to news organizations and media companies. Already engaging thousands of people and establishing a client base, the social media suite is capable of powering any international news organization’s citizen journalism arm.

It has been a really tough struggle for the SeenReport team as in Pakistan there is absolutely no platform where one could raise Angel Investment let alone VC Funding. This really is a milestone for a Pakistani Startup and we believe that this will mark a new era taking Pakistan’s name to the next level where internationally people would start taking Pakistani Startups more seriously and may be more opportunities open up for Venture Capital injection. Pakistan would start to get even more attention for being a place where innovative work is being done. Hopefully this will also encourage many other young entrepreneurs who are struggling to make an impression or thinking about starting their own business.

About the Author:

Rafaeel Akbar Chaudhry is a telecom engineer by degree. He’s a serial entrepreneur, a social media analyst, a pastime blogger and an IT consultant. He’s also currently chairing the Lahore chapter of IEEE Graduates of the Last Decade (GOLD) and has won IEEE Region 10 Leadership Award during his student life.