Story Telling Platform Pratilipi Raises $48 Million From Gaming Giant Krafton
- ByStartupStory | July 14, 2021
Pratilipi, a story platform that allows writers to share their work in different formats, has raised a $48 million financing round led by Krafton. Krafton is a South Korean gaming giant that led the Series D round for Pratilipi who’s been running for the last seven years. Existing investor Omidyar Network India along with some high-profile entrepreneurs including Pratilipi chief executive Ranjeet Pratap Singh as well as Meesho’s Vidit Aatrey, Udhyam’s Mekin Maheshwari, Unacademy’s Hemesh Singh and Gaurav Munjal, Locus’ Nishith Rastogi, and NoBroker’s Amit Agarwal also participated in the round. Pratilipi is an online reading and writing platform, where writers share their stories in several Indian languages. Initially, the idea behind the startup of the platform was to create a place where quality literary work could be hosted and shared in Indian languages, something that only had sparse representation on the web.
The platform has ballooned to become a market leader since. Over 370,000 writers on the platform today share their work in a dozen languages and more than 30 million readers browse Pratilipi each month to read their work. Writers can either choose to share their work with readers for free or charge a subscription fee. But increasingly there’s another avenue for them to monetize their work. Furthermore, Pratilipi has expanded to book publishing, audio and comics in recent years — uses proprietary algorithms to identify stories that it believes could be turned into a book or a web series and buys the IP from the writers. The startup has inked several partnerships with industry players including giant on-demand video streaming service MX Player, which carried Pratilipi’s show Midnight Lily earlier this year.
“We have been a part of Pratilipi’s growth story since the early stages,” said Pratik Poddar, Principal at Nexus Venture Partners, an early backer of Pratilipi, in a statement. “Over the years, we have witnessed the team’s deep product focus, an obsession to make creators successful, and keen understanding of monetizing content IP which is extensible across different formats.” Pratilipi is planning to use the fresh funds to expand outside of India.
“It is exciting to see the growth of Indian local IPs in online literature, comics and audio platforms in Pratilipi, which is already the largest player in India in multiple categories,” said Sean Hyunil Sohn, Head of Krafton’s India division, in a statement. “With Pratilipi already having a multilingual platform for online literature, it is poised to become one of the strongest players in emerging markets in the future. Krafton believes in the long term potential of local Indian IPs that can be successful not just in India but globally as well across formats including literature, comics and gaming and our investment in Pratilipi is another step in realising that vision.” Sean further added.
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