Adar Poonawalla picks up 20% stake in social media platform Wakau

Serum Institute of India’s chief Adar Poonawalla has picked up a 20 per cent stake in community-driven social media platform Wakau Interactive Pvt Ltd, a unit of digital entertainment and technology firm JetSynthesys.

Wakau offers a combination of mobile-first screen experience and short video content in entertainment and fashion domains with a video commerce element.

Among other famous investors in Wakau is Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan. Launched by JetSynthesys, Wakau has over 4 lakh curated user-generated videos and a song library featuring over 10,000 curated regional and main media songs for short video along with more than 25,000 named birthday songs for personalized greeting creation.

“New content formats like short entertainment and fashion videos are gaining wide scale popularity and Wakau, leveraging its advanced AI based tech stack has made it so easy, creative, fun and safe for consumers with its high levels of personalization. I’d like to congratulate the team on the AI award and am delighted to join this juggernaut of possibilities with Wakau as it sets off on its next phase of growth,” said Poonawalla, the CEO of the Serum Institute of India.

Wakau currently claims to have more than 5 lakh daily user engagement events. It has a strong regional focus on content curation and song gallery, and has artificial intelligence and machine learning at its core.

The platform also says it can support over 1 million concurrent users, and sees more than 5,000 daily video uploads.

“We created Wakau with one goal, to entertain users and promote creativity. It empowers the creator community with both distribution and monetization of content through new-age mechanisms like NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Short video sharing social media platforms have been seeing great traction from users since the last couple of years. Now no longer just a form of expression, the digital realm helps you build connections, a community of followers, and now make a mark in the metaverse," said Rajan Navani, Vice Chairman & Managing Director, JetSynthesys.

JeySynthesys is known for its global publishing partnerships with the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, Bollywood star Salman Khan, heavyweight Floyd Mayweather, and internationally renowned brands like WWE, Square Enix, Warner Music Group (WMG) and many more.

The Pune-headquartered company is the co-founder of Nodwin Gaming. Post acquiring Nautilus Mobile and its game Real Cricket, JetSynthesys along with Sachin Saga Cricket Champions, claims to be the top skill-based cricket gaming franchise in the world with over 120 million downloads and more than 1.2 crore monthly active users.