Exclusive: Vernacular content platform Bluepad shuts down operations

Vernacular content platform Bluepad has shut down its operations as the company couldn’t foresee a need for the product, two people aware of the development told Entrackr.

“The team management decided to wind up operations as they couldn't envision a strong need for the product in the market,” said one of the sources. To recall, the Bengaluru-based firm raised $244K in a pre-seed round led by Titan Capital and AngelList’s Syndicate in September 2021.

Founded by Sanjyot Bhosale, Devakrishna Asokar, and Kishore Garimella, Bluepad used to provide solutions for aggregated content in vernacular languages for Indian users to read and post their own written content such as blogs, poems, stories, and experiences in Indian vernacular languages and form communities with like-minded people.

Bluepad was positioning itself as a ‘medium’ for the non-English speaking population in India (aka Bharat users), focusing on Marathi.

In her LinkedIn profile, Bhosale has also mentioned that the team decided to wind up as it couldn’t foresee a strong urgent need for the product among the users and a reliable monetisation channel in the long term.

Bhosale, however, denied any fundraising related issues in the company.  According to her, the firm had enough money to run the business.

Post closure of Bluepad, Bhosale is serving as product manager at micro blogging platform Koo while Asokar joined Articuno Coding as chief executive officer and Garimella became founder of WorkBrow.

The slowdown in funding activities and more due diligence by venture capital firms is impacting startups across segments for the past 12 months. Flawed business models and lack of clarity are also forcing early stage companies to discontinue their operations even after raising decent money. Besides mass layoffs, we have seen a bunch of companies such as Ronnie Screwvala-backed Lido Learning, Nandan Nilekani-backed ShopX, Alpha Wave-backed Udayy, and WestBridge-backed Fraazo shuttered operations due to cash crunch and absence of the right product market fit or PMF. Entrackr had exclusively reported these developments. The list could be longer than expected as many early stage startups, including Bluepad, are expected to have shut their doors permanently in the past few months due to ongoing funding winter.

Update: The story has been updated to reflect the company's statement.