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Pratilipi, an application that unites writers in India and encourages others to try the story, has just raised $ 15 million to expand its network in the country.
The Series B financing round was led by Qiming Venture Partners. Existing Investors Nexus Venture Partners, Omidyar Network India, Shunwei Capital, Contrarian Vriddhi Fund and WEH Ventures also participated. The five-year-old start-up has raised about $ 21 million to date.
Ranjeet Pratap Singh, CEO of Pratilipi, describes his platform as "YouTube for writers". In an interview with TechCrunch, he said that more than 100,000 writers are active on the platform and that she has collected more than 5.2 million active readers per month.
Pratilipi focuses mainly on textual and audio narration in Indian languages, a niche space, but which also remains largely untapped. Singh said the platform was successful in attracting a very loyal reader base. An average reader spends about 53 minutes on the application, while users spend about 15 minutes there.
As people in small towns and villages in India connect for the first time, the demand for local language content has increased dramatically in recent years. Ankush Sachdeva, CEO and co-founder of ShareChat social networking platform, Earlier this year, he was surprised at the speed with which ShareChat had created a community of tens of millions of users by offering only content in Indian languages.
Pratilipi does not currently release any ads to its users, but the platform's writers also do not have a way to monetize their content directly. This is part of what Singh intends to change with the new capital.
He added that Pratilipi would soon start buying the rights to certain stories and help writers make deals with film studios and web series and publishing houses. An important part of the capital will go to engineering to improve the recommendations of stories that populate the platform.
"Pratilipi is well positioned to capture the next wave of Internet users in India, who prefer to use the content in their own vernacular. The company has already created a strong community of readers and writers, and network effects are powerful barriers to entry, "said Helen Pei-Hua Wong, partner at Qiming Venture Partners.
"In China, we have witnessed the rapid growth of user-generated content platforms, some of which have become the primary source of entertainment for millions of Internet users. We hope to share our experiences in China to help society grow, "she added.
Pratilipi is competing with YourQuote, which has raised about a million dollars to date. YourQuote publishes new stories about its application and organizes micro-open events in different cities and towns for writers and poets. In many ways, it also competes with ShareChat, Helo and Vmate, all of whom have built social networks around text and multimedia content.
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