UGC startup Pratilipi picked up Rs 105 Cr investment led by Qiming VP

Self-publishing platform Pratilipi has picked up a Rs 105 crore investment round led by Qiming Venture Partners, a VC based out of China.

Existing investors Omidyar Network, Contrarian Vriddhi Fund, Shunwei Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, and WEH Ventures also participated in the round taking the total of this round to $20 million - as Pratilipi had targeted.

Pratilipi is a user-generated content platform where people read, write, and publish stories written by them and they can do so in nine Indian languages including Bengali, Tamil, and Marathi among others.

The 2014 startup founded by Ranjeet Pratap Singh, Sahradayi Modi, Rahul Ranjan, and Sankaranarayanan Devarajan has lakh users, 8 lakh stories and over 5.2 million monthly active users.

The app also allows users to communicate via messages, leading to an average daily use session of 40 minutes with 2.5 million message exchanges every month. Monthly, the average time spent is 9 minutes by a user.

The aim with the new fund is to expand this user base, both writers and readers, by leveraging technology developments to improve on the interface, start new facilities like recommendation, audio stories, and personalization features.

Another plan on the company’s platter is to provide monetization opportunities to the writers, that would become a strong step towards scaling up, reports ET.

Pratilipi counts on the expectations that the next billion internet users will consume content or even the internet in their native languages and that will be the target market that would boost the content platform’s growth, especially since its user-generated.

China itself has seen UGC businesses like TikTok, Helo and others grow rapidly in its home market as well as in India and globally. This is the reason why the VCs from the country have been heavily investing in the content space in India, and even more in UGC segment. Case in point - ShareChat, Vokal.