Bluepad Vernacular Content Platform Ceases Operations
- ByStartupStory | April 13, 2023
Bluepad, a vernacular content platform headquartered in Bengaluru, has ceased its operations due to financial difficulties. The startup, founded in 2020 by Sanjyot Bhosale, Devakrishna Asokar, and Kishore Garimella, had secured INR 1.8 Cr (approximately $250K) in a Pre-Seed funding round led by Titan Capital and AngelList’s Syndicate in 2021.
Bluepad, a vernacular content platform catering to the Indian market, offered aggregated content solutions in regional languages. Users could read and share written content such as blogs, poems, stories, and personal experiences in their local languages, and engage in community-building activities. Bluepad aimed to become a leading platform for non-English speaking users in India, with a particular focus on Marathi language content. It faced competition from other platforms like YourQuote, Miraquill, and TerriblyTinyTales. However, according to Entrackr, Bluepad was unable to secure further funding after its initial funding round, leading to the decision to shut down its operations.
Sanjyot Bhosale, one of the co-founders of Bluepad, mentioned on her LinkedIn profile that the team decided to wind up operations due to challenges in identifying a reliable monetization channel and foreseeing a strong, urgent need for the product among users in the long term. Following the shutdown of Bluepad, Bhosale has taken on the role of a product manager at Koo, while Kishore Garimella has founded WorkBrow, and Devakrishna Asokar has joined Articuno Coding as the CEO, as indicated in their respective LinkedIn profiles.
The Indian startup ecosystem is grappling with a severe funding crunch, as highlighted in Inc42’s ‘Indian Tech Startup Funding Report, Q1 2023’. Startup funding in India witnessed a significant decline of 75% during the March quarter compared to the same period last year. This downward trend in funding has persisted over the past five quarters, leading to the shutdown of several startups. In 2022 alone, eight startups were forced to close down due to challenging macroeconomic conditions. Since the beginning of 2023, three more startups, including SimSim, Zili, and WeTrade, have also wound up their operations, bringing the total reported casualties of the funding crunch to 11 so far. Notably, a majority of the recently shut down startups belong to the edtech sector, with five out of the eight closures in 2022 being from the edtech space. The edtech segment has also witnessed the highest number of layoffs since the start of 2022.
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