India’s thumpN has raised $3.75 million in a pre-seed funding round to build what it calls the country’s first AI-native live entertainment platform. The round was backed by VSS Capital Partners along with investors including Madhur Deora, VG Jairam, Shray Chandra, Arijit Singh, Sunidhi Chauhan and Badshah.
Finding live events today is often scattered across Instagram, WhatsApp groups, ticketing platforms, creator pages and venue websites.
As a result, users frequently miss events that match their interests simply because they never come across them. thumpN aims to solve this problem with an AI-powered platform that helps users discover concerts, comedy shows, festivals, sports and other live experiences through personalised recommendations in one place.
What Is thumpN Building?
Founded in 2025, thumpN is building what it describes as India’s first AI-native live entertainment platform. The company was founded by Varun Khare, Shreyas Srinivasan and Alaap Gosher with the goal of making event discovery more personalised and conversational.
At the centre of the platform is Shadow, an AI assistant that lets users search for events using natural language instead of browsing through categories or applying multiple filters.
Users can simply describe what they are looking for, and Shadow recommends relevant concerts, comedy shows, sports events, nightlife, theatre performances, festivals and local experiences based on their interests, location and preferences. Instead of displaying long lists of events, the platform aims to understand user intent and surface the most relevant options.
This approach marks a shift from how traditional ticketing platforms work. Most existing platforms are designed to showcase available inventory and let users browse through it.
thumpN, on the other hand, is focused on understanding what a user actually wants to do and then recommending experiences that match. As consumer AI products increasingly move towards intent-based interactions, thumpN is applying the same principle to live entertainment discovery.
Why This Market Is Bigger Than Ticket Sales
India’s live entertainment industry has grown rapidly in recent years, with more than 40,000 live events held every year across 319 cities.
Alongside concerts and major festivals, regional entertainment has also expanded significantly, with stand-up comedy, poetry sessions, theatre performances, creator meetups, sports events, workshops and community gatherings attracting audiences across both metro and smaller cities.
As the number of events continues to grow, discovering the right ones has become a bigger challenge than buying tickets. Most users end up seeing only the most heavily promoted shows on social media or popular ticketing platforms, while thousands of smaller and niche events go unnoticed. There is also no single platform that brings together every event happening around a user.
This is where AI can play a much bigger role than traditional event listing platforms. By understanding a user’s interests, past activity, location and preferences, AI can curate personalised recommendations instead of showing the same trending events to everyone.
As the supply of live experiences continues to increase, intelligent discovery is likely to become just as important as ticketing itself.
