Nasadiya Technologies’ run self-publishing platform Pratilipi announced on Monday that it had raised $4.3 million in Series A round of funding led by Omidyar Network with participation from existing investors, Nexus Venture Partners, Atul Goel, Contrarian Capital and Times Internet Limited and new investors Shunwei Capital and WEH Ventures. The company had previously raised $1 million in its seed round in February 2016 led by Nexus Venture Partners.
Incorporated in March 2015, Pratilipi claims to be the largest Indian language self-publishing platform. Currently operational in eight Indian languages, the platform lets both professional and hobbyist writers publish their books, stories, and essays, which the startup claims is read by millions of their readers.
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. All of them hail from small towns so they could personally relate to the pain point that there was very little online content in Indian languages. According to the team’s estimates, 90 percent of Indians can only read/write/speak in Indian languages and hence they decided to build Pratilipi to cater to this target audience.
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