Varun Khare spent years inside India's live events machinery—first at Paytm Insider, then running Zomato's District after the food delivery giant swallowed up his former employer. So when he decided to build thumpN, his pitch wasn't just about better event discovery. It was about using AI to crack a market that incumbents have locked down through sheer scale and habit.
The real surprise? He convinced Bollywood singers to help fund it.
thumpN pulled together over $3.75 million in pre-seed capital from an unlikely coalition: VSS Investco, the family office of Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, led the round. But the cap table also includes Arijit Singh, Sunidhi Chauhan, and rapper Badshah—three of India's biggest recording artists. The funding was reported on July 7, 2026, a day after Khare publicly launched the platform on July 6, 2026.
It's not every day that a startup's backers include both a fintech billionaire and chart-topping playback singers. Then again, live entertainment in India is experiencing something of a moment, and Khare is betting that the next phase belongs to whoever figures out personalization first.
The Zomato Alumni Problem
Khare's background cuts both ways. He knows the business cold—he was COO at Paytm Insider before it was acquired by Zomato, with the deal completed on August 28, 2024, for ₹2,048 crore, then stayed on to lead live experiences at District, the combined entity that now commands second place in India's online ticketing wars. That insider knowledge could be an edge. It also makes his new venture a direct challenge to his former employer.
Shreyas Srinivasan, who founded Paytm Insider before the Zomato deal, is listed as a Director and Strategic Advisor to thumpN—though notably, not as a co-founder. The distinction matters in startup speak. Alaap Gosher rounds out the advisory roster.
Incorporated in October 2025 under the legal name Thumpn Entertainment Private Limited, the company operates out of WeWork Vaswani Chambers in Mumbai. By late July 2026, job postings showed hiring underway in Bengaluru for engineering roles and in Mumbai for marketing, design, and events positions.
An AI Agent Called Shadow
The platform's core offering is "Shadow," a conversational AI that supposedly learns your taste in live entertainment. Mood? Genre? Budget? Shadow sifts through events across cities and suggests options, refining its recommendations over time. According to Khare in a July 1 interview with Moneycontrol, the system aggregates listings "across the internet" rather than limiting itself to any single ticketing provider.
There's a technical wrinkle here that might appeal to the AI-curious: thumpN uses something called the Model Context Protocol, which allows external AI assistants—think Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT—to tap into its structured event data. Whether that becomes a genuine moat or just a feature competitors clone remains to be seen.
For event organizers, thumpN offers AI-assisted creation tools promising to get a new event live "in under 10 minutes," plus pricing guidance, audience analytics, and real-time sales dashboards. The company estimates India sees over 40,000 live events annually spread across 319 cities, a fragmented landscape ripe for aggregation. Or so the pitch goes.
Crowded Territory
Here's where optimism meets reality: BookMyShow owns roughly 75% of India's online ticketing market. It's a dominant position built over years, with network effects and consumer habits that don't shift easily. Zomato's District, formed from that August 2024 acquisition of Paytm Insider and TicketNew, holds second place. The deal closed on August 28, 2024, consolidating Paytm's entertainment ticketing operations into Zomato's broader "going-out" platform.
So thumpN enters as a distant third, armed with fresh capital and AI features that sound promising but remain largely untested at scale.
The macro picture, at least, looks favorable. India's media and entertainment sector hit ₹2.78 trillion in 2025, up 9% year-over-year, according to the FICCI-EY 2026 report released in March. Live events posted the fastest growth segment at 44%. The 2025 Kumbh Mela alone generated an estimated ₹2,500 crore in direct event production spending—a reminder that India's live entertainment appetite runs deep, even if much of it still happens offline or through informal channels.
The Backers Tell a Story
Beyond Sharma's family office and the celebrity investors, the round includes Madhur Deora, President and Group CFO of Paytm, alongside VG Jairam, founder of live events agency Hyperlink Brand Solutions. Shray Chandra, co-founder of wealth management firm Capitalmind, also wrote a check.
It's a mix that suggests Khare is hedging his bets: tech credibility from the Paytm circle, industry expertise from Jairam, artist perspectives from the singers, and financial acumen from Chandra. Whether that translates into product-market fit is the question every pre-seed investor is ultimately betting on.
The company hasn't disclosed its valuation, which in this market could mean anything. What's clearer is the timeline: incorporated in October, launched publicly the following July, funded within days. Fast, even by startup standards—perhaps faster than usual for a sector that's proven stubbornly resistant to disruption despite years of venture capital trying.
What Comes Next
thumpN says the capital will fund platform development, market expansion, and deeper organizer tools. The real test will be whether Shadow's AI-driven discovery actually changes user behavior, or if it's just a nicer interface on top of the same event listings everyone else has.
Khare's assembled an interesting coalition of backers. Now comes the harder part: convincing Indians to break the BookMyShow habit.
