As digital revolution sweeps India and the whole of Asia in particular, investors have started seeing potential in businesses revolving around content. Indicating that growing interest, E27, an Asia-focused Tech And Startup News blog, has closed a $650K bridge round, ahead of a larger — $3 Million round which it expects to close buy this year’s end.
While no official disclosure of the exact amount and subsequent use has been disclosed by the blog, the figures we have reported above, come from TechCrunch, who in turn sourced it from inside sources within the blog.
E27, currently runs an online news website, reporting on tech and startup from Asia in particular. It is pretty much an upfront tech+startup news platform like us here or TechCrunch,focused primarily on Asia though.
Apart from this, the company, as is usually the case with digital media companies in this space, runs a conference business as well, which are two-day Echelon conference — this year sponsored by Braintree.
E27 co-founder and CEO Mohan Belani said in an interview,
We’re hunkering down and focused on what we believe is right for the ecosystem. The entire media industry is going through an interesting evolution, we’re learning what works best for our ecosystem.
E27’s funding becomes interesting, considering how we have started seeing a trend of investments into digital media spaces within Asia. The most recent example would be TechInAsia, who though started with an upfront news reporting model, later changed their site model to a more User-Generated-Content stuff. While that has spiked visitor counts, it has led to a degraded quality content, which is obvious since user-content can’t really be edited the way news articles from professional journos are.
However, even though Asia sees surging investments within digital media, India is yet to see a big ticket investment into this particular space. While VCCircle did get acquired by Newscorp, it was largely on the back of its data-platform VCCEdge and its events/training divisions. Hence, big-ticket investments void in digital media space continues to exist.
Nevertheless, it is turning out to be an interesting couple of years for Digital Media, content-focused tech news platforms within Asia. Last year, Malaysian website DigitalNewsAsia, run be veteran and notable tech and enterprise journalists, too raised a $300K round. However, we haven;t seen much activity from the company post that though.
As for E27, Belani continues to remain tight-lipped about future plans,
At this moment, I’m pretty focused on running the company and working with our users help them better connect with Asia’s tech ecosystem,
he told TechCrunch.
