Venture Catalysts leads Rs 8.5 crore investment in dialect OTT startup STAGE

Venture Catalysts has led an Rs 8.5 crore investment in STAGE, a hyper-local, dialect-based over-the-top (OTT) platform, Your Story reported.

According to Dr Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder and President of Venture Catalysts, STAGE “created the perfect niche by not falling into the already saturated market of movies and web series.”

STAGE was founded in 2019 by Singhal, Shashank Vaishnav and Parveen Singhal as an off-shoot of their content curation website WittyFeed (2014). It features various art forms such as comedy, folk, poetry and storytelling – all in dialects.

Vinay Singhal, Founder of STAGE told the news site the investment would help the platform increase their rate of content creation and scale distribution to hit the next two million users.

“The extensive Indian market is looking to consume high quality professionally-generated content but no one’s creating it. That’s the need gap that our company is solving under this new vision of building a ‘premium and sensible content company for Bharat',” he added.

STAGE is at present pre-revenue and has planned to launch subscription services by January 2021-end. Its potentially addressable market for the platform is 450 million strong.

Ranjan expressed confidence in the venture: “Since the WittyFeed founding team has already made their mark by becoming the second largest content creators in the world, it's only a matter of time before STAGE will receive similar success in India.”

The funding was also joined by Abhishek Shah, Founder of ConversionX; Ashish Tulsian Co-founder of POSist; Angel Investor Hetal Sonpal; Angel Investor Janarthan Balasubrramanian; Nandi Mehta, CFO of KAAF Investments; Piyush Goel, Founder of Beyond Key Systems; Rohit Chanana of Sarcha Advisors); Sachin Bhatia, Co-founder of Bulbul.tv and former Co-founder of MakeMyTrip; Sawan Laddha, Founder of Workie; Sushma Kaushik, Partner at Aavishkaar; and Vishal Maheshwari, India Head of OTT platform VIU, the report said.