Pratilipi raises $4.3mn in funding

Nasadiya Technologies-run self- publishing platform Pratilipi has raised USD 4.3 million funding, led by Omidyar Network.
The series A round also saw participation from existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Atul Goel, Contrarian Capital and Times Internet Ltd as well as new investors Shunwei Capital and WEH Ventures, a statement said.
The funds will be used to expand and strengthen the existing team in the areas of product, technology and data science and also for further growth and partnerships, it added.
The company had previously raised USD 1 million in its seed round in February 2016 led by NVP.
Incorporated in March 2015, Pratilipi is the largest Indian language self-publishing platform currently operational in eight Indian languages.

Over 80 million content pieces have been read on the platform with over 1.5 lakh content pieces published by more than 22,000 authors.

The company has a current team size of 31 people and was started by five co-founders -- Sankaranarayanan Devarajan, Rahul Ranjan, Sahradayi Modi, Prashant Gupta and Ranjeet Pratap Singh.
"We started Pratilipi with the vision that language should not be a barrier for people to share their stories with each other," Singh, who is also the CEO, said.
Omidyar Network Investment Partner Siddharth Nautiyal noted that 99 per cent of online content is available in English, despite an immense demand for local language content.

"Pratilipi has demonstrated steep growth to become the largest destination platform for long format vernacular writing and reading catering to the needs of millions of Indian language Internet users," he added.