A new study of researchers at Kingston University says that what you read greatly impacts your personality. If I try to summarise it in a single sentence, then the sentence will be “You became what you read.” Pratilipi is an excellent option to increase our reading habits.
About the company
Pratilipi is a MobileApp platform that brings readers, writers, and their stories together. It is an Indian online self-publishing and audiobook portal, and Pratilipi allows users to publish and read original works such as stories, poetry, essays, and articles.
It also allows readers to rate content posted by others, subscribe to authors, and interact with their followers through messaging. Currently, it features content in twelve Languages: Hindi, Urdu, English, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Punjabi, and Odia.
Founders
Ranjeet Pratap Singh, Prashant Gupta, Rahul Ranjan, Sahradayi Modi, and Sankaranarayanan Devarajan launched the Pratilipi in September 2014. They founded it to promote Indian languages. Formerly, Pratilipi was a self-funded platform.
At its launch, the platform featured content in only two languages: Hindi and Gujarati. It later expanded to six more languages; Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. Later they extended it to twelve languages.
- Ranjeet Pratap Singh is the Co-founder and CEO of Pratilipi. He started his career as an ASM of Vodafone.
- Sahradayi Modi is the product manager and the Co-founder at Pratilipi. She served as a Channel Manager at Vodafone India.
- Sankaranarayanan Devarajan is the Co-founder of Pratilipi. He was a Management Trainee at Vodafone. He was also served as an Analyst and Trader at Capstone Securities Analysis Private Limited.
- Rahul Ranjan is the Tech Co-founder at Pratilipi. He was a Systems Engineer at TCS.
- Prashant Gupta was the Co-founder and CTO at Pratilipi
About their Business Model
Pratilipi works on a commission basis. The company is making money with the help of new authors. Authors showcase their books and sell their books through Pratilipi, which the company earns up to 70% of its revenue.
About their funding and investment
Initially, the company was self-funded and raised $975K through seed funds for two rounds. Then around 2018, raised $4.3 million from Lead Investor Omidyar Network, series A round.
In 2019 raised $14.7K from Qiming Venture Partners as a lead investor in Series B round. In 2020 raised $9.4 million through a Series C funding round from Tencent Holdings.
In July 2021, Pratilipi bagged $48 million in Series D from investors led by KRAFTON Inc. In 2021, the company raised funds $2.68 million by taking a loan from Alteria Capital. So collectively company was funded by 12 investors and raised $78.8 million till now.
Achievements
Startup Launchpad Award for the best startup. Pratilipi was awarded Eureka Award for Best Business Idea by IIT Bombay. Pratilipi is a vernacular storytelling platform. The company has recorded rapid growth in the year 2020.
The current number of active users is 20 million. Previously, the number was 20 million monthly users. The company is further looking to explore the markets overseas, as per the recent press release.
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Future Plans
The recent funds would help the company strengthen its IP acquisition and help in promising development across a range of formats, including but not limited to audiobooks, podcasts, comics, and web series. Pratilip stated in a recent press release that the company would also look forward to overseas expansion.
The company has no plans towards monetizing the platform in the future. But Ranjeet Pratap Singh says that he has some theories to generate more revenue in the coming days. Pratilipi will only be able to do this task when the team conducts a survey.
Conclusion
Pratilipi founders found that we have too many readers and writers between us, and everyone has at least one story to tell. As we have always seen in every startup story, they found the gap, brought the solution, and boom!. They make it easy with the help of technology. There is no need to carry heavy books if reading is your hobby; Pratilipi is for you if Writing is your hobby.
If you are a new author and worried about who will read your content, then Pratilipi is for you. If you are an author and want to increase your reach using technology, then also Pratilipi is for you.
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