Kahaniya.com, an online portal for storytelling, has raised its seed funding round worth around ₹1.3 crore. The investment was raised from a group of undisclosed US-based investors, who are NRIs.
The funding will be used by the Hyderabad-based startup to offer more regional languages on its platform. It was started out with Telugu language and now the company is planning to add Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Malayalam over the next months.
Apart from that, the company is now also evaluating the business-to-business segment as a potential revenue channel. Pallav Bajjuri, co-founder of the startup, says:
Broadly, there will be two aspects to our B2B play: to help companies communicate better in regional languages and to better engage with employees.
We realised that there is a huge vacuum in the availability of regional language content in categories like literature and education. The regional content on the web is dominated by films, news, and music.
The platform was launched in May 2016 by Pallav Bajjuri, Devendar Gona, Jeswanth Padooru and Sandeep Ponagandla. It allows users to publish and monetise content in regional languages. Content publishers can monetise their content by charging for a book, single chapters, or a series, and can develop it further based on the response received.
As per the company, it currently has over 30,000 pieces of content and has onboarded 800 Telugu writers, out of which almost 70 have collectively generated ₹2.2 lakh in revenue.