SpinItUp Raises ₹50 Lakh Pre-Seed on Zee TV’s Ideabaaz to Power India’s DJ Creator Economy

Mumbai, December 5, 2025 — SpinItUp, an interactive music-commerce startup that lets club-goers pay to request songs during live DJ sets, has raised ₹50 lakh in a pre-seed round at a reported ₹10 crore valuation from Zee TV’s Ideabaaz Titans and a clutch of well-known angel investors. ^[1]

The round features Jimmy Mistry (Della Adventure Resorts), Anupam Bansal (Liberty Shoes) and Archana Jehagirdar (Rukam Capital) as key backers, and was closed after the startup appeared on Zee TV’s new startup reality show Ideabaaz. ^[2]

At today’s exchange rate — roughly ₹90 per US dollar — the funding of ₹50 lakh (₹5 million) is about $55,000, and the ₹10 crore valuation works out to roughly $1.1 million. ^[3]

Funding Round at a Glance

Startup: SpinItUp (also stylised as “Spin It Up”)
Sector: Music-tech, interactive music commerce, nightlife / DJ economy
Round: Pre-seed
Amount: ₹50 lakh (~$55k)
Valuation: ~₹10 crore (~$1.1M)
Lead backers: Zee TV Ideabaaz Titans; angels Jimmy Mistry, Anupam Bansal, Archana Jehagirdar ^[4]
Use of funds: Tech stack upgrades, hiring across product & growth, pan-India expansion, analytics & marketplace features, DJ & venue onboarding ^[5]

What SpinItUp Actually Does

SpinItUp positions itself as “India’s first interactive music commerce platform”. The core idea is simple but powerful:

Audience: Club-goers use a mobile interface to pay for song requests, optionally with shoutouts or personalised messages.
DJs: Get real-time, transparent commissions on each paid request, on top of their fixed gig fee. They can accept or reject requests and manage live playlists from a dashboard. ^[6]
Venues: Bars and clubs get a zero-capex engagement layer that increases dwell time, perceived “VIP treatment” and spend, while SpinItUp builds analytics for customer engagement and revenue uplift. ^[7]

Today, most DJs in India still depend almost entirely on per-night payments from venues, with limited tools to monetise fan demand directly. SpinItUp aims to formalise that “slip-a-note-to-the-DJ” culture into a transparent, trackable revenue stream with digital receipts and dashboards. ^[8]

Founders and Origin Story

SpinItUp was founded in 2023 by:

DJ Sanjay Meriya (“The Spindoctor”)
Sudeep Bansal
Prathmesh Munoth ^[9]

According to multiple reports, co-founder DJ Sanjay draws on his own journey of hustling through late-night gigs to build a tool he says he wished existed earlier in his career. He has spoken about wanting to make life “less of a struggle” for DJs who currently have limited paths to scale their income. ^[10]

Co-founder Sudeep Bansal moved back to India from the US to build the company, and has described the Ideabaaz round as validation of a concept he was initially nervous but optimistic about. ^[11]

The founding trio’s bet is that live music + fintech-style payments + creator tools can fundamentally upgrade how DJs, venues and audiences interact in India’s nightlife ecosystem.

Traction: 450+ DJs, 10 Venues, 120% YoY Revenue Growth

Despite still being pre-seed, SpinItUp is not at idea stage. Across coverage on Indian Startup News, MediaNews4U, MarcaMoney and LinkedIn posts by Indian Startup Times, a consistent traction picture emerges: ^[12]

450+ DJs and performing artists
Live in 3 Indian cities
10 partner venues (pubs, bars, clubs)
Monthly payouts of ₹5,000–7,000 per artist
Revenue growth of ~120% year-on-year

For early-stage music-tech, these numbers are modest but meaningful. A few thousand rupees extra per month per artist may not sound huge, but for DJs operating on thin margins, the incremental, recurring nature of this income — tied directly to audience engagement — is what makes it interesting.

If SpinItUp hits its own target of onboarding 5,000 DJs and performing artists in the next 12 months, and can maintain similar per-artist payouts, the platform’s gross payout volume could increase by nearly an order of magnitude, assuming venue and user engagement scales with it. ^[13]

The Ideabaaz Effect: TV-Backed Capital Meets Bharat’s Nightlife

The round also matters because of where the capital is coming from: Zee TV’s Ideabaaz, a new startup reality show and marketplace that launched on 25 October 2025 on Zee TV and ZEE5. ^[14]

What is Ideabaaz?

A national stage for Indian startups, designed to give founders access not only to funding but also mentorship, services and distribution. ^[15]
Explicit focus on Tier-2 and Tier-3 city founders, bringing “Bharat’s startup manch” to mainstream television. ^[16]
Features a panel of Titans — investors and operators — who can write cheques on-air, similar in spirit to Shark Tank but with a hybrid marketplace model.

SpinItUp’s pre-seed round coming via Ideabaaz suggests the show is quickly evolving into a real deal-flow engine, not just a TV-only spectacle. The association with a national broadcaster also gives SpinItUp valuable brand visibility and distribution into nightlife and entertainment circles that traditional SaaS-only music-tech startups sometimes struggle to access.

Business Model: Turning Song Requests into a Revenue Layer

From public information, SpinItUp’s model can be summarised as a three-sided marketplace:

Users / party-goers
- Pay a small fee per song request (and potentially for shoutouts or dedications).
- Access a transparent queue of upcoming songs and requests, reducing the classic “will the DJ ever play my song?” uncertainty. ^[17]
DJs and live performers
- Receive a commission on each request, tracked in a dashboard with real-time balances and payout history.
- Use SpinItUp to manage requests, prioritise high-value ones, and maintain set cohesion. ^[18]
Venues (clubs, pubs, lounges)
- Pay no upfront hardware cost and minimal operational overhead.
- Benefit from richer customer data, engagement metrics and potential revenue uplift per cover or table.
- Use analytics (still in development) to track how interactive requests correlate with sales and dwell time. ^[19]

In effect, SpinItUp is productising the tip jar, but with data, UX, and platform economics layered on top.

Market Tailwinds: Nightlife Recovery and the Creator Economy Boom

1. India’s nightlife market is quietly large – and growing

Multiple research houses track India’s pub, bar, café and lounge (PBCL) market:

IMARC Group estimates the PBCL market at $2.8 billion in 2024, projected to reach $5.8 billion by 2033 at a 7.4% CAGR. ^[20]
Another report from Research & Markets pegs the market at $3.07 billion in 2024, projected to touch $4.64 billion by 2030, implying annual growth of around 7.1%. ^[21]

Globally, pubs, bars and nightclubs form a $36.2 billion market in 2024, expected to reach $58.4 billion by 2034 at around 4.9% CAGR, signalling stable medium-term growth. ^[22]

SpinItUp is aiming straight at the experience and engagement layer of this market, rather than the food-and-beverage or real estate side, which keeps its capital intensity relatively low.

2. The creator economy is exploding — especially in India

On the creator side, the macro story is equally strong:

Globally, the creator economy is expected to grow from about $205 billion in 2024 to over $1.34 trillion by 2033, a CAGR of 23.3%. ^[23]
In India, Coherent Market Insights estimates the creator economy market at about $1.46 billion in 2025, projected to $5.93 billion by 2032, growing at roughly 22% CAGR. ^[24]
A joint report by the Indian government and Boston Consulting Group notes 2–2.5 million active digital creators in India, already influencing over $350 billion in annual consumer spending, with that influence expected to cross $1 trillion by 2030. ^[25]

DJs and nightlife performers are part of this broader creator wave, but historically under-monetised compared to influencers and streamers. SpinItUp’s thesis — that DJs deserve the same kind of direct-to-fan monetization rails as YouTubers or livestreamers — lines up cleanly with these macro trends.

3. Music-tech is crowded but still under-served for live performance

According to data compiled on Indian music-tech, there are about 622 music-tech startups in India, 57 of which are funded, having collectively raised around $478 million in venture capital. ^[26]

Most of this activity, however, is concentrated around:

Streaming platforms and aggregators
Rights management and licensing
Artist discovery and fan communities

The real-time commerce layer inside physical venues — where SpinItUp operates — remains comparatively nascent, which gives the startup room to carve out a defensible niche if it executes well.

Product Roadmap: From Requests to Full-Stack Analytics

Across press coverage and the founders’ own statements, the use of funds and roadmap centre on four themes: ^[27]

Technology enhancement
- Making the platform “the smoothest and fastest DJ-earnings app in India.”
- Improving latency, reliability and UX for clubs that operate in noisy, high-traffic environments.
Analytics & dashboards
- Building advanced analytics for DJs and venue partners, including:
  - Customer engagement metrics (requests per hour, repeat users, etc.)
  - Revenue uplift associated with interactive requests
  - Audience preference heatmaps by time, genre or demographics
Marketplace & discovery
- Expanding the platform into a marketplace where venues can discover DJs (and vice versa) based on performance data, ratings and genre fit.
Pan-India expansion
- Onboarding 5,000 DJs and performing artists over the next 12 months, up from 450+ today.
- Targeting “every major nightlife city” and strengthening partnerships with clubs and bars nationwide. ^[28]

If realised, this would shift SpinItUp from a “tip-jar app” into a data layer for nightlife, something that could be attractive not just to venues, but eventually to brands, ticketing players and even labels.

Why Investors Are Paying Attention

For Zee TV and the Ideabaaz Titans, SpinItUp checks several boxes:

Clear user behaviour: People already request songs and “tip” DJs; SpinItUp formalises and scales this behaviour rather than trying to invent a new one. ^[29]
Multi-sided network effects: More DJs attract more users; more engaged users make the platform more attractive to venues; more venues increase monetization opportunities for DJs.
Media synergy: As a nightlife-focused product, SpinItUp sits close to Zee’s entertainment DNA. TV exposure can directly translate into club and DJ interest. ^[30]
Alignment with creator economy themes: Investors globally are racing to back tools that help creators monetise directly from fans; this is that story, but for DJs and nightlife creators. ^[31]

The relatively small cheque size is also typical of signal rounds emerging from TV formats: the capital is meaningful for a lean startup, while investors mainly get optionality on a potentially outsized upside if the marketplace scales.

Coverage So Far: How the Story Broke

The funding has been covered across multiple Indian startup and business outlets in the last 48 hours, including:

StartupTalky, which appears to be one of the earliest online reports, detailing the funding amount, valuation and investor list. ^[32]
Indian Startup News, emphasising the DJ monetization gap, traction metrics and 12-month expansion goals. ^[33]
MediaNews4U, framing the raise as a media-and-creator economy story from Mumbai. ^[34]
MarcaMoney, which adds founding-year details, co-founder list and a more granular explanation of the venue and artist dashboards. ^[35]
Short-format updates from Inshorts and Indian Startup Times on LinkedIn, which highlight SpinItUp’s current scale — 3 cities, 450+ DJs, 10 venues and 120% YoY revenue growth. ^[36]

Together, these reports sketch a consistent narrative: SpinItUp is early but real, and investors are treating it as a serious bet on the future of India’s DJ and nightlife ecosystem.

Key Challenges to Watch

While the story is promising, there are non-trivial risks:

Rights and licensing complexity
- Any monetization tied to music can raise questions around performance rights and licensing regimes. SpinItUp will need to ensure its model aligns with existing licensing frameworks and collective management organizations in India.
Regulatory and tax considerations
- Real-time micro-payments from club-goers to DJs could trigger GST, TDS or other compliance obligations; the UX can’t become so complex that it kills spontaneous spending.
Unit economics and tipping culture
- India is still price-sensitive. The platform must balance affordable request prices with meaningful earnings for DJs and a viable platform take-rate.
Defensibility
- The underlying idea is relatively easy to copy. SpinItUp’s moat will likely come from network density (DJs + venues), superior UX, data ownership and possibly brand partnerships.

These are not deal-breakers, but they will shape whether the company remains a niche tool or evolves into a foundational layer of India’s nightlife stack.

Outlook: Could Interactive Music Commerce Become the New Normal?

Given:

The steady growth of India’s nightlife market,
The explosive rise of the creator economy,
The relative under-monetization of DJs and live performers, and
SpinItUp’s existing traction and TV-backed validation,

it is reasonable to see SpinItUp’s ₹50 lakh pre-seed round as more than just a small cheque. It is an early signal that interactive, real-time fan commerce inside physical venues may be the next frontier in music-tech.

If the team can:

Successfully expand from 450 to 5,000+ DJs over the next year,
Build robust analytics that venues actively use and trust, and
Navigate the regulatory and licensing landscape cleanly,

SpinItUp could emerge as one of the anchor platforms of India’s DJ and nightlife creator economy — and a case study in how TV, tech and nightlife can converge into a sustainable, data-driven business.