Classifieds platform Quikr has invested $100,000 in an entertainment services app that will cater to the needs of aspiring actors and models who are on the lookout for acting and modelling opportunities in films and TV.

Quikr has partnered with a dedicated team of professionals led by a producer based in Mumbai who will work with Quikr’s technology team to launch the service soon.

“Although we have an entertainment category on Quikr, people don’t know about the breadth of its offering. Since we don’t have the bandwidth to build everything ourselves, we are working with a dedicated team to create a platform for actors and models who seek auditions for roles in films and TV, which will later expand to provide opportunities to cinematographers, script writers, art directors, musicians, sound engineers, set designers, etc. We are investing $100,000 to build and market the app,” Pranay Chulet, co-founder and CEO, Quikr, told Business Line.

While the name of the app has not been finalised yet, Chulet says they are considering calling it ‘Dazzle.’

Quikr incubator “We want to grow this app separately and will use it to power our entertainment category but at the same time we will allow it to flourish independently,” said Chulet.

The app will be incubated in Quikr’s new 4-acre campus, which was inaugurated on Tuesday, and will be the first of many ideas that will take shape in its in-house Incubator that will be formally launched in two months.

The in-house Incubator is an attempt to attract young technologists who want to experiment with new ideas along with Quikr’s 300-strong technology team. Earlier this year, Quikr opened up its APIs (application programming interface) to encourage developers to build apps on the Quikr platform and has already received 250 applications which Chulet said, will be filtered down to 10 that will be incubated in-house.

Each of the ideas will receive a funding of $20,000-30,000. “We want to give more people access to our platform to build apps. More valuable than the seed funding we provide, is the fact that we are giving them access to our transaction flow and to a vast network of buyers and sellers across all 12 categories on Quikr.”

500 new hires Over the last three months, Quikr has added 500 to its headcount which stands at 1,600 employees and is expected to touch 2,000 by June.

Quikr attracts 30 million monthly unique visitors, has 15 million active listings a month and records 60,000 transactions daily.

From July to October, Quikr launched a new brand identity and four sub-brands — QuikrCars, QuikrHomes, QuikrJobs and QuikrServices.

Related Topics