Qiming leads $15m round for Indian publishing platform
Qiming Venture Partners has led a $15 million Series B round for Pratilipi, a publisher of Indian vernacular language content.
This represents the Chinese venture capital firm's first direct investment in India, according to AVCJ Research. However, the GP has exposure to the country through Club Factory, a Chinese e-commerce platform that sells fashion products in a number of overseas markets, of which India is the largest.
Founded in 2014, Pratilipi publishes a wide range of content including journalism, fiction, poetry, and long-form nonfiction in eight Indian languages and in English. The platform claims to have published more than 100,000 writers and to have over 5.2 million active monthly readers.
In addition to Qiming, existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Omidyar Network India, and Shunwei Capital – all of which supported Pratilipi’s $4.3 million Series A round last year – participated in the latest round. Pratilipi will use the new capital to improve its technology infrastructure, bring more writers onto the platform, and add new forms of content such as audio stories.
“In China, we have seen the fast growth of user-generated content platforms, some of which became the main source of entertainment for millions of internet users,” said Helen Wong, a partner at Qiming, in a statement. “We hope to share our experiences in China to help the company grow.”
Replicating the growth of user-generated content in India is complicated by the multiplicity of languages spoken across the country. While English can serve as a lingua franca in commercial or government contexts, Indian consumers like media content to be delivered in their native languages.
Companies targeting this opportunity include DailyHunt, a mobile platform backed by Sequoia Capital that publishes and aggregates news in 17 languages, and ShareChat, a social networking platform supported by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
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