Airtel has acquired a strategic stake in a digital publishing company Juggernaut Books, it announced in a statement. The company did not disclose financial details of the deal.
The investment from Airtel will help Juggernaut to expand its distribution network and ramp up its content acquisition, digital marketing and prepare for a subscription offering launch in the next few months, the statement added.
Note that Airtel had partnered with the publishing startup in October last year, as an addition to telco’s host of apps and features under its Airtel Apps section. This move might help Airtel to strengthen its bundled services offerings.
Launched in April 2016, Juggernaut is backed by former investors include Infosys co-founder and current chairman, Nandan Nilekani and Boston Consulting Group India CEO Neeraj Aggarwal. The platform claims to have close to 1 million downloads across Android and iOS. In May 2017, platform went live to offer writers to digitally publish their content and stand a chance to win publishing contracts. The writer’s platform in the past six months has received just under 500 stories with 9 of them securing publishing contracts, according to a statemented shared by the company.
Last week, MediaNama pointed out that Juggernaut Books is doing what movie and TV content producers do: increasing distribution and taking their content to where the audience is. Besides Airtel partnership, it has bagged three partnerships across three different categories. It partnered with train travel app RailYatri, which claims to have an active user base of 10 million travellers every month. It also partnered with MakeMyTrip, offering up to five free books on the Juggernaut App. Also, Juggernaut partnered with Apollo Hospitals giving access to 10 free books in the Juggernaut app with a collection exclusively curated for the hospital.
