Kyt Ventures backs Zealthy - A Women Centric Vernacular Healthcare Platform

Zealthy, a women centric vernacular healthcare platform, has raised an undisclosed amount in seed round from Kyt ventures, First Cheque, AngelList and few prominent angel investors. 

The Bengaluru based startup plans to use the funding to further develop its product and technology offering, include more Indian languages and bolster its tier 2, 3 cities base across India. 

Started in 2019 by Dr Rishi Malhotra and Akhil Gupta, Zealthy is a holistic and trustworthy women-only platform to understand, share and learn health issues specific to women in their local languages. It connects users to reliable healthcare providers for specialties like maternity, infertility, cosmetic interventions etc. at affordable prices.

Dr Anu Gupta, Co-founder Kyt Ventures said, “Being a doctor and a woman, I could see how Zealthy’s women centricity, Tier 2/3 focus and vernacular strategy have the potential to lead the next phase of digital health in India.” 

 Zealthy claims to have over 5 million google impressions. Interestingly, 70% of the searches coming from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities are in vernacular language. The startup already has a footprint across 15+ cities and has partnered with few of the prominent names including Apollo cradle, Milann, Morpheus, Motherhood and other maternity homes.

Consumption healthcare is a $40 billion market with a CAGR of more than 20%. It is huge, fragmented, highly competitive and lacks targeted customer acquisition channels which presents an opportunity for disruption. 

The mHealth sector alone is expected to grow to $1.6B by 2022. While Practo, Lybrate, mfine, DocsApp are the key players providing online health services,  players like MyUpchar differentiates itself by providing health information in vernacular languages and Elawoman has a special focus on infertility services.

Gagan Gupta, Co-founder Kyt Ventures said that Zealthy team with its mobile plus internet plus vernacular strategy, is well poised to make a major impact in the fem-tech segment. 

About Kyt Ventures 

Kyt Ventures is a unified startup funding, incubation and acceleration platform, backed by its pan-India angel network. Launched in last quarter of 2019, Kyt Ventures already has a geographic footprint across 9 cities spread from Tie I to Tier IV cities. Kyt is sector agnostic and invests in promising early stage ventures from pre-seed to pre-series A. 

Vernacular Podcasting Platform Kuku FM Raises Funding from Shunwei Capital, others

Mumbai-based podcasting and audiobooks platform Kuku FM has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from China's Shunwei Capital and Indian venture capital firms India Quotient and 3One4 Capital, reported LiveMint.

Founded in 2018, by Lal Chand Bisu, Vinod Meena and Vikas Goyal, Kuku FM is a podcast platform that is re-inventing the traditional radio by allowing listeners to easily discover new, emerging and diverse audio content, and engage with their favorite creators.

Kuku FM gives a platform to some of the best content creators in India to launch and expand their very own podcasts.

Kuku FM provides production, distribution and marketing support for creators, and claims to have over a million listeners spending over 50 minutes a day on the platform. This includes famous feeds like Quora and Quorans from Quora, Dainik Bhaskar and dozens more.

Kuku FM has a library of 2 Lakh+ audios with most of them in Hindi language. The platform, with its app, also provide bestselling English books translated in Hindi as well as the famous Hindi books. The Audiobooks has range of categories like motivation audiobooks, self help audiobooks, spiritual audiobooks, business audiobooks along with a diverse library of fiction audiobooks from genres like Love, Crime, Horror, Comedy & Kids.

Kuku FM is aiming to be the biggest vernacular platform in that space, enabling the regional superstars to get their voices heard. We currently have content in Hindi and are actively onboarding creators from the 23 major languages of the country.

Vernacular News Platform Lokal Raises $3 Mn from 3one4, Y Combinator, others

Local language news aggregator and knowledge platform Lokal has raised $3 million (~ Rs 21.2 crore) in a funding from a clutch of investors, including the Bengaluru-based 3one4 Capital and Y Combinator, reported VCCircle.

Singapore-based boutique venture fund RB Investments, SOMA Capital also contributed to the round, along with existing investor India Quotient, which had previously invested an undisclosed amount in the startup, in August last year.

Lokal will use the funds to enhance its product, team expansion, foray into new markets.

Founded in 2018, by Jani Pasha and Vipul Chaudhary, Lokal is serving a largely under-served market in India which got access to the internet recently because of Jio and cheaper smartphones. Lokal gets its news from qualified freelancer ground journalists. The company claims to delivers local news quicker than any other news platform.

Besides local online platforms, global online giants are also witnessing is a rise in the number of content viewers in vernacular languages including Hindi, Tamil and Bengali in smaller cities and towns. In September, Google-owned video platform YouTube announced that there is a significant amount of content is being created in vernacular languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Malayalam.

Last month, Matrubharti, also a vernacular content platform, has raised about Rs. 3.24 crores in angel round of funding from US-based Gujarati NRI angel investors.

In July last year, vernacular knowledge platform Vokal had raised $5 million in a Series A round of funding lead by China’s Shunwei Capital, and 500 startups. Vokal also acqui-hired StupidChat Technologies, a quizzing app startup, in an all-stock deal, in May this year.

Social Gaming Platform WinZO launches AI enabled Initiative for Vernacular Language Gaming

WinZO Games, a vernacular social gaming platform, today announced the addition of 10 new arcade games to its existing portfolio of 30+ games on the platform, now offering more than 40+ games to users in various formats.

WinZO is creating an online experience of Arcade Gaming for Tier II/III audience who may not have access to offline arcade gaming experience which are available in malls in metros. The platform has added popular titles like Metro Surfer, Stupid Birds, Car Racing, Space Hunter, Bear Run, Howzzat, Fly Balloon and Rummy, aims to add another 10 games in the coming months.

WinZO also launched a special feature; WinZO Social- an initiative to build community of casual gamers. WinZO Social can help connect nearby players, top players by their performance and creating gaming challenges amongst random players. The idea is to give the players not just gaming experience, but a sense of belongingness. Apart from challenging friends, WinZO Social has its indigenous chat with audio video capability. This AI enabled initiative will help WinZO to curate personalized gaming experience for each user.

Mr. Paavan Nanda, Cofounder, WinZO Games, said: “It is really exciting times for Mobile gaming industry in India. The industry is evolving everyday working to build a more conducive mobile gaming ecosystem and changing the entertainment landscape, it is no surprise that the gaming space is getting increased attention and investment, not just from within the industry, but more recently from traditional financial markets and even governments.”

He further added: “WinZO’s social multi-player skill gaming platform clocked 50 million gaming minutes every day and has been able to successfully monetize this engagement. The company is growing 50% month on month. On one hand, large OTTs platforms are struggling to monetize in India, but WinZO is facilitating the first-ever M&E transactions from the T2/T3 audiences.”

WinZO games crossed the 10 million install base mark in less than a year, the platform recorded more than 2 million account linkage on the platform, with an average user making 20-25 micro transactions per month on the platform.  The platform is reaching to the masses with its unique multilingual gaming app; currently the users can play games in 10 languages with Punjabi and Bhojpuri being the latest ones. WinZO plan to introduce 6 more languages within this year.

WinZO is designed to solve the monetization issue in the Indian gaming ecosystem, which experiences one of the highest engagements globally. According to a report by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) there were 451 million monthly active internet users at end of financial year 2019, with users spending over 40-50 minutes daily playing games on their smartphones as per a recent KPMG report. These users hardly make any in-app purchases and advertisement revenues for some of these Digital Assets are abysmally low vis-a-vis some of its global counterparts.

Increasing mobile penetration and high usage has led to a surge in mobile gaming in India. The average mobile device user spends 3-4 hours every day watching OTT, playing games and music or on online shopping. Mobile gaming, however, is the fastest-growing source of entertainment for Indian users. This upsurge will create immense opportunities in the gaming ecosystem, employment generation, entertainment, engagement, and market growth.

 

Healofy Strengthens its Regional Reach with Launch of 7 New Indian Languages on its Social Network

Healofy is on a mission to fulfill the content gap across vernacular languages and help Indian women in different stages of their lives.

Healofy, India’s largest and fastest growing women’s social network has launched 7 Indian regional languages - Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam on its platform. Prior to this, Healofy was available in English and Hindi. Today, more than 61% of users on the app are regional language users and after Hindi, the top 3 regional languages with the most active userbases are Marathi, Malayalam and Bengali.

According to the "Toward Gender Equity Online: Research with the Next Billion Users" report by Google India, “women are reluctant to network online on social platforms due to the fear of harassment and lack of a safe community”. Healofy’s mission is to create a vernacular social network exclusively for Indian women to feel informed, safe and empowered, allowing them to consume, connect and transact in a trusted space.

The average ‘Indian internet consumer’ prefers content in their native language. Today, in India, 9 out of 10 new smartphone users look for credible and relatable regional language content. Additionally, women often struggle to find relevant content and supportive communities online, and Healofy is addressing this by offering vernacular content on various topics of women’s interests such as pregnancy, parenting, food, fashion, beauty, lifestyle and others in 9 languages - English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Healofy also ensures that the content is culturally and regionally contextual, for maximum relatability with users.



Healofy’s interface is highly user-friendly, with every feature being available in regional languages. Healofy has disrupted the traditional peer-to-peer interaction experience by introducing a chat transliteration feature which allows any user to type regional words using English characters, which the app converts on the fly into the regional script.

“It has been an incredible journey for us over the last three years. We are creating significant impact by empowering women and providing them with a safe community in which to connect, share, and learn in the language they are most comfortable in. Our growth rate in vernacular has been 4 times faster than that of English and this itself is a great validation of the huge need for a vernacular women’s social network”, said Gaurav Aggarwal, CEO and Co-Founder of Healofy. 

Healofy aims to empower women by enabling them to not just consume but also create their own content, and showcase their skill sets. They can connect and influence other like-minded women based on similar language, location, stage of life, as well as interests such as earning from home, learning different skill sets, fashion, fitness, lifestyle, etc.

[caption id="attachment_136231" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Gaurav Aggarwal - CEO and Co-founder of Healofy[/caption]

Further on, Healofy envisions to help women attain financial independence by helping them earn from home via network e-commerce. By allowing women to form meaningful connections and relationships with other women in the Healofy community, the aim is to replicate the offline experience of networking and ‘shopping together’ in the online world.

With 2 million+ app downloads, Healofy has successfully created a strong community of over 500,000 Daily Active Users (DAUs) and 1 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) on their Android app exhibiting strong engagement and retention. The platform also sees 1.5 million+ monthly website visits.

Healofy till date has raised $9.5M in funding from Omidyar, BabyTree Group (01761.HK, China’s Largest Parenting Platform, a Public company), BAce Capital - a fund backed by Alibaba’s Ant Financial Services Group, and angel investors.

About Healofy

Healofy is growing into India’s largest social network exclusively for women, addressing the growing need for credible and relatable content for Indian women. Healofy was founded in September 2016 by Forbes 30-Under-30 awardees Gaurav Aggarwal and Shubham Maheshwari, alumni of IIT Guwahati and NIT Warangal respectively. Initially focused on women’s critical-health content like conception, pregnancy and post-pregnancy care, the app has since become the leading social network for women in India which aims to create an online community where Indian women can feel informed, safe and empowered, allowing them to connect consume, connect and transact in a trusted space.

 

Vernacular Content Startup Matrubharti Raises Funding in Excess of Rs. 3 Crores

Matrubharti, a vernacular content start-up from Ahmedabad has today announced that it has closed a round of angel funding from US-based Gujarati NRI angel investors to the tune of Rs. 3.24 crores.

The funding comes on the back of Matrubharti launching its OTT video streaming platform Matrubharti Vishesh in July this year, after being selected for Gray Matters Capital’s Digital Accelerator Program – GMC Calibrator in March 2019.

One of the angel investors in this funding round are Darshan Jani, a serial entrepreneur turned investor with over 20 years of experience in the tech industry evenly distributed between US and India. He was VP of Engineering, Products and Operations at Automation Anywhere - a $2.6billion company and a global leader in Robotic Process Automation.

The other 2 investors are NRIs from USA, they have invested through their companies called Surya Holdings LLC and Ferrana LLC.

Matrubharti is an Indian content community platform helping writers publish their content and to reach out to their target readers. The content is in the form of stories and episodic novels that is written in vernacular languages like Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi.

Matrubharti has also launched its OTT video streaming platform called Matrubharti Vishesh which curates videos of Theatrical Plays, Short films, Web series, Elite Author speeches, Stand-up comedy, Poetry Shows and a host of User Generated Content.

Speaking about the funding, Mahendra Sharma, Founder and CEO, Matrubharti said, “It is their love for India and her languages that has magnetized the interest of our investors, and validated by the growth potential seen from the macros of the next 500 million internet users in India will be from semi urban and rural ‘Bharat’ who’d prefer to consume their informational and entertainment content in vernacular. We at Matrubharti aspire to be the Netflix of Bharat and a platform of choice for such internet consumers.”

Matrubharti has now over 1 Million registered users and over 250,000 Monthly Active Users (MAUs).

With this funding, it aims to add content in 3 South Indian languages soon on its platform and build stronger technology and data intelligence to engage users better. The money would also help it boost its sales efforts besides expanding into geographies with a strong presence of Indian diaspora.

“We are aiming to grow 3 fold with this funding round,” added Sharma.

Surmounting the OTT Monetization Challenge

Matrubharti is partnering with content production houses, theatre schools and event organizers to help them monetize their visual content on its community platform. It is also testing monetization with advertisements from hyper local businesses.

“While monetization is a challenge faced by competing OTT platforms; we are overcoming this challenge through better user engagement. Users of Matrubharti spend as much as 25 minutes per session per day on the vernacular books and videos, which is above the industry standard. We believe that longer the screen time, higher the possibility to monetize via advertisements,” said Sharma. “Given the uniqueness of offline event content, content licensing is another revenue stream that we’ve been exploring”.

Unique selling proposition 

Matrubharti’s content from over 100 offline events conducted across 30 cities over the last 3 years under its banner differentiates it from competition

User generated content (UGC) is one of the prime features of Matrubharti where over 2.5 lakh pieces of textual content and over 10,000 videos are uploaded by its community members. Such videos are mostly from offline community events like Open Mic, Poetry reciting, Storytelling and Performances which are curated by Matrubharti.

With the launch of its OTT Video streaming platform – Matrubharti Vishesh, its content library also boasts of 150+ high quality videos of Video stories, Web series, Short Films, Stand-up comedies and Theatrical plays which are in Gujarati and Hindi language, with a run time of 30 - 90 minutes.

Microsoft Rolls Out Support for 8 Indian languages in Teams

As part of its efforts to make communication and collaboration easier at the workplace and empower employees who prefer to work in local languages, Microsoft has rolled out support for eight Indian languages in its hub for teamwork called Teams. Strong support for Hindi has been added to Teams on Desktop and Web while the application's mobile version has been localized in eight Indian languages, namely- Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Malayalam.

Microsoft has been at the forefront of technology development in Indian languages since 1998 when Project Bhasha was started in India. Its support for Indian languages goes far beyond productivity and is now enhanced by artificial intelligence. Collaboration is yet another important area of focus for the company in its efforts to make the power of computing available to all and to make it language-agnostic.

By extending Teams' support to eight Indian languages on mobile devices, Microsoft is aiming to benefit a larger number of users including the first line workers. The new developments will further strengthen Teams as the hub for teamwork that brings people together and fosters a culture of engagement and inclusion.

By using Microsoft Teams, organizations can avoid using an array of disparate apps and move to a single, secure hub that brings together processes such as chat, meetings, calling and content sharing. Teams enjoys native integration to the Office 365 apps while users can also customize and extend their experience with third-party apps, processes, and devices.

Teams on desktop and web

Teams provides seamless text input support for all Indian languages active on a desktop and users can leverage interesting stickers in their own language when words do not seem enough to express their views. Most of such assets come with native Hindi translations but they can also be edited if the user wants to add a dash of personal creativity. Stickers such as 'दे ताली' gel very much with today's social media generation and make the conversations appear informal and interesting.

Indian users will find the localized Hindi interface of Teams useful and easy to understand. Microsoft's localization approach has been to use simple and popular Hindi words instead of their comparatively more Sanskritized forms.

In an AI-powered feature, Microsoft has added real-time inline translation to Teams chats where text can be translated between Hindi and other world languages including English. Another important feature is Hindi support for 'Immersive Reader', the popular accessibility feature of the application. Following this, Teams can also read out messages received in Hindi.

Teams on mobile devices

Users can change the user interface of Teams in iOS and Android by setting the default language of their operating system on iOS and Operating systems. This will lead to a localized UI provided the language chosen is one of the eight Indian languages, ie. Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Malayalam. On mobile devices, Team's display language is determined by the default language of iOS or Android operating systems. However, text input is not limited to these languages as the user can type in any language of his/her choice, supported on the OS.

WinZO aims to bring 500 Mn People of Vernacular Bharat to use Digital Payments

WinZO, India’s largest vernacular arcade gaming platform, today announced that 30% of its users on the platform are making their first-ever digital entertainment transaction through WinZO. 80% of these players are using the platform in a non-English language, and playing from 1500+ cities, towns, villages across India. This number is set to increase as the gaming platform reaches to more users in Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier 4 and 5 cities in India. India is already a global number one in terms of mobile gaming installs.

Gaming in India is witnessing noteworthy transition, owing to the digital revolution and a multitude of other factors like increasing mobile phone penetration with bigger screen size and storage facility, low-cost data, growth in Micropayments and rise in disposable income.

WinZO, backed by Kaalari Capital, offers 30+ games on its App-based platform in 10 languages, namely English, Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi and Bhojpuri. WinZO Games is offering games in multiple formats like 24*7 Tournaments, Real-time multiplayer format - WinZO Baazi, and the Versus mode. The ticket for games varies from Rs. 2 to Rs. 25 with the average time spent on the platform is more than 55 minutes and with more than 90% of users are using the app from non-metro cities of the country.

Commenting on strengthening the online gaming ecosystem Mr. Paavan Nanda, Co-Founder WinZO Games said: ‘As Mobile gaming ecosystem consolidates in India, it is important for the industry to focus on the quality of content and at the same time improve the monetization to expedite the growth. With WinZO, we are bringing the much-enjoyed off-line experience of arcade gaming to the digital grid, promoting social gaming and bite-sized entertainment in India. Many WinZO users are making their very first entertainment and media transaction on the platform and we aim to strengthen this confidence by adopting a more social and customized content creation for our users.’

He further added ‘Typically a user makes 8 transactions on the platform in a month. These are all bite-sized transactions. As the audience is maturing the gaming industry is likely to dominate the market as more opportunities open up for gaming platforms and game developers. It is notable that the industry now is also attracting talents across the value chain like data scientist, designers, a behavioral psychologist and programmers’

WinZO is designed to bring about a stable monetization model in the Indian gaming ecosystem, which experiences one of the highest engagements globally. There are 400 MM internet users who spend on an average over 45 minutes daily playing games on their smartphones. These users hardly make in-app purchases and Advertisement revenues for some of these Digital Assets are abysmally low vis-a-vis some of its global counterparts.

According to the recent Media and Entertainment report by KPMG Mobile Gaming is set to grow at a CAGR of 32.2% from FY19 to FY24, user’s engagement especially among a younger audience, gaining further tractions.

The average mobile device user spends 3-4 hours every day watching OTT, playing games and music or on online shopping. Mobile gaming, however, is the fastest-growing source of entertainment for Indian users. This upsurge will create immense opportunities in the gaming ecosystem, leading to employment generation, entertainment, engagement, and market growth.

OYO Rolls out Hindi Support to Woo Users from Tier II, III cities

Indian hospitality firm OYO Hotels & Homes on Monday said it has started offering multi-lingual support, including languages like Hindi and Bahasa, on its customer app and mobile web platforms.

Multi-lingual support is now available for Hindi, English, Bahasa (Indonesia), Arabic, Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and the company plans to introduce additional Indian and international language support in the coming months, a statement from OYO said.

"Through its newly launched multi-lingual support on the customer app and mobile web platforms, OYO aims to offer a hassle-free and customised booking experience to millions of users across the world," it added.

In June this year, OYO witnessed about 40 per cent demand coming from non-metro users in cities like Jaipur, Noida, Pune, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Bhubaneswar, Ahmedabad, Indore, Dehradun, Patna, Bhopal and Ghaziabad.

OYO said offering Hindi language support will help the company extend support to more users in tier-II and tier-III cities in India, and reach out to the growing number of vernacular internet users.

Using the 'Change Language' functionality, users will be enable to switch from English to the available languages and access the booking service.

OYO Lite, a lighter version of the customer app, has been rolled out in Hindi and Bahasa languages.

"With this multi-lingual support, we aim to make user interactions hassle-free and convenient, further adding to the overall customer experience across the world. Hindi is the most widely spoken language in India and we believe that the language support makes us more accessible to our customers in tier II and III cities," OYO Hotels & Homes Group Chief Technology and Product Officer Anil Goel said.

Over the last many months, digital commerce companies like Amazon and Flipkart have been rolling out vernacular support on their platforms to tap the next 200 million internet users.

According to industry reports, Hindi internet user base is likely to outgrow the English user base in India by 2021, and along with Marathi and Bengali users will drive volume growth.

After adding the capability of browsing and transacting in Hindi language to its India website and app last year, US e-commerce giant Amazon had recently announced an automated messaging assistant (chatbot) in Hindi that can help customers who prefer Hindi to engage for getting their queries resolved.

Walmart-owned Flipkart has also rolled out Hindi support and plans to add other vernacular languages like Tamil, Telugu and Bengali on the platform in the coming months. PTI SR

E-Sports Gaming Platform WinZO focuses on Bharat to build community of Gamers, Local Youth and Influencers

India’s gaming industry is witnessing a watershed moment, propelled by increased penetration of smart phones, especially in the Tier II and Tier III cities. Lead by- better connectivity, different & new modes of social interaction, and a growing young population, smart phones are turning out to be an effective medium of entertainment, replacing all other mediums.

Betting on this opportunity, WinZO Games has become India’s biggest vernacular e-sports gaming platform. WinZO, a Kalaari backed Series A venture, has been dubbed as the ‘Netflix of Gaming’. With all your favourite games available on a single platform, you will never miss out on entertainment on WinZO. WinZO currently hosts 25+ games on its platform and is the only platform in India that offers such diverse gaming experience as it is available in eight languages already (Hindi, English, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu). With 5 million+ install base in just one year, it is one of the fastest growing players in the industry!

Commenting on this Mr. Paavan Nanda, Co-founder WinZO Games said, “More than 75 per cent of our users are using the platform in non-English languages and 90 per cent content is consumed in non-metro cities across 200 different cities across India. Our focus is on vernacular users and providing personalised content to them. With WinZO, we have built a stable monetization model for the casual gaming genre in India, by taking a very non-traditional path-breaking approach to reach this audience.

He Further Added “WinZO is building its community online and offline by engaging YouTube and TikTok influencers in a very personalised manner.”

With an aim to strengthen the influencer community, WinZO has started an influencer-focused feature, ‘WinZO Superstar’ across India. Through this, it is inviting the influencers to partner with WinZO. After registering for this feature, these influencers are provided with specific links to promote WinZO on their social media handles for which they are rewarded. WinZO offers these influencer’s opportunities with high-earning potential that varies from Rs. 25,000 weekly to Rs 5 lakhs monthly, basis the leader board on the app.

This feature is empowering social media influencers with parallel earning and employment opportunity and has created an innovative and stable incentive channel for these local influencers on a larger scale to support every effort they make to promote the platform. WinZO is helping these micro influencers to grow their reach on their respective social media handles by featuring their content on their app and social handles as well. Currently WinZO has collaborated with 20,000+ such influencers and is building a strong locale around the same.

WinZO has helped these micro influencers to envision the bigger possibilities in life and achieve what they have always dreamt of. Video/Content of these influencers is featured directly on the app, where they get a chance to garner 50 lakh eyeballs, hence an opportunity to grow with the platform itself.

India is witnessing the biggest revolution of all times, with 300 million people coming on smart phones for the first time ever. This number is projected to almost double by 2022 to 500 million people. This entire set of upcoming Smartphone users will create immense opportunities for E-sports to flourish, engage people and create a localized experience. In India, E-sports as a category in the gaming industry is a new concept and the market is tipped to grow at a very large scale.

Earlier this month, e-sports platform founded by founders of CREO, Mobile Premier League (MPL), has recently forayed into the Southeast Asia market with its launch in Indonesia. MPL has recently raised $35.5 Mn funding from Sequoia India and others in last month.

In March, an another gaming and e-sports platform GamingMonk had raised $100,000 as strategic investment from GameWith, a Tokyo, Japan-based gaming media company.

Hyperlocal News Platform PublicVibe (formerly NewsDistill) Raises Funds from IAN, Anthill and Hyderabad Angels

Hyderabad-based PublicVibe (formerly NewsDistill), a vernacular hyperlocal community news platform, has it raised an undisclosed amount in a funding led by Indian Angel Network (IAN) with participation from Anthill Ventures and Hyderabad Angels.

Bikky Khosla and Prashant Pahade from IAN will be joining the board of PublicVibe.

PublicVibe, which plans to launch a hyperlocal advertisement network in support of small businesses, will use the freshly raised capital in scaling its platform in one of the vernacular languages and to optimise its AI infrastructure for scaling up.

Launched in 2015 by Narasimha Reddy, PublicVibe serves instant hyper local news so that people aware of whats happening around them and involve to make a difference. Its mobile app connect people in a locality, bring awareness and it can also lead to resolution of local problems.

PublicVibe is also the winner of NASSCOM and Facebook's top 10 startups in India to create social impact and the product that can touch people lives at all levels in India.

Prior to the latest funding, PublicVibe had raised $100,000 in seed funding in September 2016. In that round, noted investors and technology leaders contributed to the funding and those include Mr. Narasimhan Ganesh, Senior Director, Box.com, Mr. Ramana Thumu, Vice President – eBay, and Mr. Sudhir Mallem - Uber.

Growing Vernacular Content Consumption

In a report published in March last year by IAMAI and Kantar IMRB, it was revealed that 205 million new internet users would come online if content is available in Indian vernacular languages, which will be key motivation of using internet for people who are not using it.

In January, Mumbai-based Agrahyah Technologies announced the launch of Aawaz.com, an audio on demand platform with 100% professionally generated content in Indian vernacular languages.

Last November, Vokal launched Video Questions & Answers (Q&A) in vernacular languages making it as the first product in India to be bring such a feature to vernacular Internet users.

In July last year, Vokal, a peer-to-peer (P2P) knowledge-sharing platform in Indian Languages, had raised $5 million in a Series A round of funding led by China’s Shunwei Capital and 500 startups.

Source - The Hans India

Knowledge Sharing Platform Vokal Launches in 10 More Indian Languages

Vokal, India’s largest vernacular interest-based knowledge sharing platform, announced its launch in 10 additional Indian languages. It is now available in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Oriya & Assamese.

Available both in Android app and iOS App as well as a progressive Web App, Vokal now has over 2 million monthly users and is growing 30-50% every month. It plans to cater to 100 million monthly users within 2 years.

In November, the company also launched Video Q&A in vernacular languages that enabled knowledge sharing in audio and video and will soon be available in text for those who prefer reading over listening or watching.

Aprameya Radhakrishna, CEO Vokal said, “We’re very
excited to open up the platform to 10 new Indian languages. Language diversity
is unique to India. We look at this diversity as a reality and an opportunity.
Vokal has always wanted to level the field for Indians. We believe in the power
of the Internet and want to enable the best minds of India to share knowledge
in their respective language. Launching a new language unleashes the power of
knowledge sharing among creators and knowledge access among the respective
language’s users. We are happy to be a catering to a larger number of
communities now.”

Mayank Bidawatka, Co-founder Vokal said “Vokal aims
to be one of the first few products to be used by India’s 500 million
vernacular Internet users. Every new language accelerates our movement in that
direction. We have had a strong demand for other Indian languages from the
respective communities. We are happy to have learnt community preferences in
Hindi and now have the ability to launch in multiple languages within days. We
will launch in multiple other Indian languages in the year. This is just the
beginning.”

Vokal is India’s
vernacular knowledge sharing platform. Vernacular users use Vokal to learn
something new every day from the best minds in the community. This knowledge
sharing revolves around large interests. Users get to choose from 10+ interests
and can follow creators among 1000s of sub-interests. Users can seek knowledge
by asking questions. These questions are answered in regional languages by
volunteering experts on the platform. Most of the answers are in video and
audio. Text knowledge will soon be launched on the platform.

About
Vokal:

Vokal is the India’s largetst Knowledge sharing platform in Indian
language- Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telgu, Malyalam, Kannada, Punjabi
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Vokal First to Launch Video Q&A in Vernacular Languages

Vokal is a peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing platform for India’s non-English Internet users. The product is a few months old and already boasts of 500000+ questions with 1000s of questions pouring in everyday on varied topics that are very unique to India. Vokal is currently in Hindi and launching in multiple languages in the next few months itself. It also has a live video streaming feature where experts share their knowledge with users.

This week Vokal launched Video Questions & Answers in vernacular languages. Vokal is the first product in India to be bringing such a feature to vernacular Internet users. Video answering helps animate and humanize the Question & Answer format and make it a lot more interesting for the viewer.

Users can ask questions using the voice / text option as usual and knowledge contributors now have the option to respond either in audio or video.

Aprameya Radhakrishna, CEO & Co-founder, Vokal said “We’re excited about being the first in India to introduce Video Q&A in vernacular languages. Indians have shown a preference for video as a format on most global platforms. Our contributors are enjoying answering using video. It’s an addictive format and is showing healthy engagement. We are format agnostic and will continue innovating on offerings to suit the Indian vernacular Internet audience.”

Mayank Bidawatka, Co-founder, Vokal said “Video viewership is increasing worldwide. Even in India people spend a lot of time on YouTube and watching videos on social media platforms. Thanks to cheaper and faster mobile Internet Indians have taken to watching videos without worrying about running out of data packs. We got requests from our users to introduce video answering. A face lends credibility to the answer and helps the viewer get to know the contributor better. We invite Indian experts to contribute in their native language to bring knowledge parity for vernacular India. The language diversity issue is unique to India and we can’t expect a solution from anyone who never faced this diversity.”

Vokal, India’s largest vernacular knowledge sharing platform, recently raised a $6.5 million Series A that saw a participation from Kalaari Capital along with Shunwei Capital, 500 startups, Accel India & Blume Ventures too.

In May this year, Vokal had also acquired StupidChat Technologies, a quizzing app based out of Bangalore, in an all-stock deal.

Amazon Launches Hindi Website & App; Bengali, Tamil Next Target

In March, a report by IAMAI and Kantar IMRB said that 205 million new internet users would come online if content is available in regional Indian languages, which will be key motivation of using internet for people who are not using it.

Nobody in the industry took it seriously except Amazon India it seems.

Amazon India, on Tuesday, said that its e-commerce website and mobile application were available in Hindi to reach next 100 million consumers in the country. With this Amazon has beaten every other e-commerce players in the country as except Amazon India none of India’s leading e-commerce portals - Flipkart, Snapdeal or Paytm Mall - currently have a local language version of their apps or websites.

But this is not enough for Amazon as the tech giant plans to support more local Indian languages on its shopping app and mobile website and will also extend the service to mobile platforms beyond Android, said Kishore Thota, Amazon India’s head of customer experience and marketing, without giving a timeline.

According to last Indian Census 2011 data on language, the percentage of Indian population with Hindi as their mother tongue has risen to 43.63% from 41.03% in 2001.



Kishore Thota, director (customer experience and marketing) at Amazon India said in a statement to Livemint, "We are starting with Hindi and as we learn (from) the experience and become rock-solid, we would be in position to understand the other languages,” The focus will be on Hindi over the next year and Amazon may delve into regional languages like Bengali and Tamil after that.

Notably, Bengali is the second most spoken language while Marathi replaced Telugu in third place, according last Indian Census.

According to Thota, Amazon India has an internal team called “Reach”, which is working on how to tap the next million users.

Currently, players such as Paytm Mall offer users the option to use Hindi as a language. However, Flipkart is available only in English.

"Launch of the Hindi shopping experience is a significant step towards bringing the next 100 million customers online. This first Indian language launch will enable Hindi-preferring customers to shop in their preferred language," Amazon India vice-president (category management) Manish Tiwary said at a press conference.

With the addition of Hindi, customers will be able to read product information, find deals, place orders and pay for them in Hindi.

Amazon Launches Hindi Website & App; Bengali, Tamil Next Target

In March, a report by IAMAI and Kantar IMRB said that 205 million new internet users would come online if content is available in regional Indian languages, which will be key motivation of using internet for people who are not using it.

Nobody in the industry took it seriously except Amazon India it seems.

Amazon India, on Tuesday, said that its e-commerce website and mobile application were available in Hindi to reach next 100 million consumers in the country. With this Amazon has beaten every other e-commerce players in the country as except Amazon India none of India’s leading e-commerce portals - Flipkart, Snapdeal or Paytm Mall - currently have a local language version of their apps or websites.

But this is not enough for Amazon as the tech giant plans to support more local Indian languages on its shopping app and mobile website and will also extend the service to mobile platforms beyond Android, said Kishore Thota, Amazon India’s head of customer experience and marketing, without giving a timeline.

According to last Indian Census 2011 data on language, the percentage of Indian population with Hindi as their mother tongue has risen to 43.63% from 41.03% in 2001.



Kishore Thota, director (customer experience and marketing) at Amazon India said in a statement to Livemint, "We are starting with Hindi and as we learn (from) the experience and become rock-solid, we would be in position to understand the other languages,” The focus will be on Hindi over the next year and Amazon may delve into regional languages like Bengali and Tamil after that.

Notably, Bengali is the second most spoken language while Marathi replaced Telugu in third place, according last Indian Census.

According to Thota, Amazon India has an internal team called “Reach”, which is working on how to tap the next million users.

Currently, players such as Paytm Mall offer users the option to use Hindi as a language. However, Flipkart is available only in English.

"Launch of the Hindi shopping experience is a significant step towards bringing the next 100 million customers online. This first Indian language launch will enable Hindi-preferring customers to shop in their preferred language," Amazon India vice-president (category management) Manish Tiwary said at a press conference.

With the addition of Hindi, customers will be able to read product information, find deals, place orders and pay for them in Hindi.

TaxiForSure Co-founder’s Vernacular Platform Vokal Raises $5 Mn from China’s Shunwei Capital

Vokal, a peer-to-peer (P2P) knowledge-sharing platform in Indian Languages, has announced that it has raised $5 million in a Series A round of funding lead by China’s Shunwei Capital, and new investor 500 startups.

The financing round also saw participation from existing investors Accel India and Blume Ventures, it said in a statement.

Notably, Vokal was co-founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna, who is one of co-founders of cab hailing, TaxiForSure, which got acquired by its bigger rival Ola in 2015.

In the same year, Radhakrishnan co-founded Vokal along with Mayank Bidawatka. In Feb. 2016, the startup raised it first funding of $2 million from Blume Ventures and Accel, who had invested in TaxiForSure too.

Vokal was also one of the participants at Google India’s first mentorship and bootcamp program called - Solve For India - that the tech giant officially launched in this year only.

"Anyone who doesn’t know English in India has a huge problem of accessing relevant answers to their questions. Their Internet experience is poor with a dearth of meaningful content. We’re building a peer-to-peer content network that can cater to their information & knowledge needs," said Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder and CEO, Vokal.

On the talent front, Radhakrishna said, “We are 35 people and will keep it a tight team for the foreseeable future, not exceeding 50.”

“Language diversity is an Indian problem and Vokal is building India-specific solutions to cater to the information and knowledge needs for the non-English users. We are happy to support Vokal’s mission of creating a destination for the vernacular audience. The market is expected to balloon to 550+ million users over the next couple of years,” Anand Daniel, Partner, Accel Partners added.

Vokal is a few months old and already boasts of 200000+ questions with 1000s of questions pouring in everyday on varied topics. It also has a live video streaming feature where experts share their knowledge with users.

Vokal is currently available in Hindi and is launching in multiple languages in the next few months, the statement added.

In March, a report by IAMAI and Kantar IMRB said that 205 million new internet users would come online if content is available in Indian languages, which will be key motivation of using internet for people who are not using it, said

Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder, Vokal said, “India is one of the few countries with such a large language diversity. The Indian vernacular segment is poised to be almost twice the size of the United States. Their Internet experience is broken with basic translation widgets available as solutions for their information and knowledge needs. We are creating a product grounds-up that they can use everyday."

To recall, Vokal has recently acqui-hired StupidChat Technologies, a quizzing app startup, in an all-stock deal, in May this year.

Commenting on the Vokal deal, Tuck Lye Koh, Partner and CEO, Shunwei Capital said, “India is a large market and the language Internet users are underserved today. We are bullish on Vokal’s ability to create an information and knowledge platform to cater to this segment of users.”

Recent Investment in Vernacular Segment

Last year in May, Kalaari Capital owned seed program, Kstart Capital, had invested an undisclosed amount in Vernacular.ai, a broad-based engagement platform for a billion Indians using AI to address needs of people who can be reached only through vernacular languages.

Last August, Delhi-based B2C vernacular podcast aggregator platform Funcastic raised seed funding from a startup accelerator launched by HT Media Ltd and US-based investment firm North Base Media.

Shunwei Capital & Its India Investments

Founded in 2011 by Tuck Lye Koh and Lei Jun, Beijing-based Shunwei Capital is a venture capital fund focused primarily on early- to mid-stage investments in China’s internet industry and manages over 2 billion in US dollars across five funds. The VC firm seeks to invest in the technology, media, telecommunications, high technology, new media, games, internet finance, and rural area internet sectors.

Shunwei has increased its investment portfolio in India in the past few years. Last July, It led $1 million seed round of Clip App, a Bengaluru-based digital media video startup. Prior to this, it also invested $3M in Series A funding of Truebil, an India's only curated, authentic and verified marketplace for pre-owned cars.

It also led a $6.25 million (Rs 43 crore) funding round for Pune-based online lending startup LoanTap, and participated in a $30 million Series B round raised by Cheche365.com, an auto insurance search engine, in November last year that was led by China Capital Group Ltd. A month before that, Shunwei along with Xiaomi Technologies led an $8 million Series A round for Bangalore-based microlending platform KrazyBee.

TaxiForSure Co-founder’s Vernacular Platform Vokal Raises $5 Mn from China’s Shunwei Capital

Vokal, a peer-to-peer (P2P) knowledge-sharing platform in Indian Languages, has announced that it has raised $5 million in a Series A round of funding lead by China’s Shunwei Capital, and new investor 500 startups.

The financing round also saw participation from existing investors Accel India and Blume Ventures, it said in a statement.

Notably, Vokal was co-founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna, who is one of co-founders of cab hailing, TaxiForSure, which got acquired by its bigger rival Ola in 2015.

In the same year, Radhakrishnan co-founded Vokal along with Mayank Bidawatka. In Feb. 2016, the startup raised it first funding of $2 million from Blume Ventures and Accel, who had invested in TaxiForSure too.

Vokal was also one of the participants at Google India’s first mentorship and bootcamp program called - Solve For India - that the tech giant officially launched in this year only.

"Anyone who doesn’t know English in India has a huge problem of accessing relevant answers to their questions. Their Internet experience is poor with a dearth of meaningful content. We’re building a peer-to-peer content network that can cater to their information & knowledge needs," said Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder and CEO, Vokal.

On the talent front, Radhakrishna said, “We are 35 people and will keep it a tight team for the foreseeable future, not exceeding 50.”

“Language diversity is an Indian problem and Vokal is building India-specific solutions to cater to the information and knowledge needs for the non-English users. We are happy to support Vokal’s mission of creating a destination for the vernacular audience. The market is expected to balloon to 550+ million users over the next couple of years,” Anand Daniel, Partner, Accel Partners added.

Vokal is a few months old and already boasts of 200000+ questions with 1000s of questions pouring in everyday on varied topics. It also has a live video streaming feature where experts share their knowledge with users.

Vokal is currently available in Hindi and is launching in multiple languages in the next few months, the statement added.

In March, a report by IAMAI and Kantar IMRB said that 205 million new internet users would come online if content is available in Indian languages, which will be key motivation of using internet for people who are not using it, said

Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder, Vokal said, “India is one of the few countries with such a large language diversity. The Indian vernacular segment is poised to be almost twice the size of the United States. Their Internet experience is broken with basic translation widgets available as solutions for their information and knowledge needs. We are creating a product grounds-up that they can use everyday."

To recall, Vokal has recently acqui-hired StupidChat Technologies, a quizzing app startup, in an all-stock deal, in May this year.

Commenting on the Vokal deal, Tuck Lye Koh, Partner and CEO, Shunwei Capital said, “India is a large market and the language Internet users are underserved today. We are bullish on Vokal’s ability to create an information and knowledge platform to cater to this segment of users.”

Recent Investment in Vernacular Segment

Last year in May, Kalaari Capital owned seed program, Kstart Capital, had invested an undisclosed amount in Vernacular.ai, a broad-based engagement platform for a billion Indians using AI to address needs of people who can be reached only through vernacular languages.

Last August, Delhi-based B2C vernacular podcast aggregator platform Funcastic raised seed funding from a startup accelerator launched by HT Media Ltd and US-based investment firm North Base Media.

Shunwei Capital & Its India Investments

Founded in 2011 by Tuck Lye Koh and Lei Jun, Beijing-based Shunwei Capital is a venture capital fund focused primarily on early- to mid-stage investments in China’s internet industry and manages over 2 billion in US dollars across five funds. The VC firm seeks to invest in the technology, media, telecommunications, high technology, new media, games, internet finance, and rural area internet sectors.

Shunwei has increased its investment portfolio in India in the past few years. Last July, It led $1 million seed round of Clip App, a Bengaluru-based digital media video startup. Prior to this, it also invested $3M in Series A funding of Truebil, an India's only curated, authentic and verified marketplace for pre-owned cars.

It also led a $6.25 million (Rs 43 crore) funding round for Pune-based online lending startup LoanTap, and participated in a $30 million Series B round raised by Cheche365.com, an auto insurance search engine, in November last year that was led by China Capital Group Ltd. A month before that, Shunwei along with Xiaomi Technologies led an $8 million Series A round for Bangalore-based microlending platform KrazyBee.

Kstart Invests in Vernacular.ai, Multilingual AI Platform for Businesses

Kstart Capital, a unique seed program by one of India’s leading Venture Capital firms Kalaari Capital, has invested an undisclosed amount in Vernacular.ai recently. The company is founded by 3 IIT Roorkee graduates, Sourabh Gupta, Akshay Deshraj and Manoj Sarda.

“Our vision is to create a broad-based engagement platform for a billion Indians using AI to address needs of people who can be reached only through vernacular languages. In a country of more than 1.3 billion people, only about 150 million can understand English. For others, Internet is largely inaccessible. We are building India specific products to solve this problem. We are delighted to be supported by Kstart and to see them share our vision", commented Sourabh Gupta, CEO, Vernacular.ai.

Vernacular.ai has been working with financial institutions on interesting use-cases resulting in scalable ways to increase business, reduce operational expenditure and enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction. Businesses in India are struggling to engage with their multi- lingual customers digitally. By 2020, India will have more than 500 million mobile Internet users who don’t use english.

“The challenges of Indian languages are very different from English. Transliteration in different scripts, identification of context for each language and wide usage of a hybrid combination of multiple languages are complex NLP problems. We are developing our own in-house technology to solve this problem in collaboration with leading industry and academia”, noted Akshay Deshraj, CTO Vernacular.ai.

Vernacular.ai launched a B2C product earlier this year called Aisha - India’s first personal assistant in Hindi Language for people living in Tier-2 & Tier-3 areas. The product saw strong traction with 50 thousand users exchanging over a million messages in a short period.

“Vernacular.ai marks the success of our EIR program, and the first to convert to a portfolio company. The founders have scaled up their business rapidly by being resourceful and also shown the resilience to keep evolving their approach to solving this problem. We see this as a huge untapped opportunity and are excited about the future possibilities to create impact”, adds Muthiah Venkateswaran, Partner, Kstart Capital.

Sumit Jain, Partner, Kalaari Capital, who joins the board of the company observed, “There is a significant opportunity for Indian AI startups to solve India specific problems both for businesses and consumers. We are confident that Vernacular.ai will become the engagement partner of choice for businesses that want to leverage AI to solve for core issues. We wish the founder's great success in this journey”.