Self-publishing platform, Pratilipi, announced that it has raised $4.3 million (approximately Rs 28 crore) in a Series-A funding round. The round was led by Omidyar Network, and saw participation from prominent new investors like Shunwei Capital and WEH Ventures as well as existing investors like Nexus Venture Partners, among others.
The latest influx of funds will be employed towards further developing the product’s features and personalising it for users in addition to hiring more tech talent. The news of the funding was first updated by the data intelligence platform, Paper.vc.
“We now have over 80 million content pieces read on the platform and our daily active user spends 35 minutes a day reading, the goal is to now personalise the experience and to build out the product, hiring more people for our tech team that are equipped with ML, data science and other such capabilities,” Ranjeet Pratap Singh, Founder, Pratilipi, told the Economic Times.
The startup was founded in March 2015 by Sankaranarayanan Devarajan, Rahul Ranjan, Sahradayi Modi, Prashant Gupta, and Ranjeet Pratap Singh. The portal is claimed to be the country’s largest Indian language self-publishing platform. It currently features content in eight Indian languages. Professional and amateur writers can publish their works on the platform, which are read by millions of readers. The company had previously raised $1 million in seed funding in February 2016. The seed funding round had seen participation from well-known investors like Nexus Venture Partners, Contrarian Opportunities Fund I, Times Internet Ltd and Equity Crest founders Deepak Gupta and Amit Wadhwa among others.
The startup’s primary competitors include PlanetGoGo, which is an app that allows users to find content in regional languages. ShabdNagiri, which is a social networking website in Hindi and ShareChat, which is an Indian regional language social platform. The latest funding raised by Pratilipi will serve to strengthen its position against its competitors.
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