Inc42 (hey folks!), the over two-year old startup centric blog, has announced raising of an undisclosed amount in Pre-series A, led by existing investors Unicorn India Ventures. This comes amid heavy investments in the field of Digital Media, with several Asian startup centric online media platforms getting decent backing from reputable investors.
For Inc42, this round also saw participation from a number of high net-worth and active angel investors, including, Lookup’s Deepak Ravindran, Provogue’s Salil Chaturvedi, Arihant Patni, FreeCharge founders Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon, as well as InMobi co-founders Mohit Saxena and Amit Gupta, among others.
Founded over two years ago by Pooja Sareen, Utkarsh Agarwal and Vaibhav Agarwal, Inc42 pens down pieces and publishes stories catering around the overall startup ecosystem development — thus pitting it closer to YourStory. The blog also publishes various opinion pieces by notable founders, sourced from a variety of sources in a bid to provide up and coming entrepreneurs, the right reading materials in their growing stages.
Talking about her company’s editorial focus, Chief Editor Pooja Sareen says,
We believe that besides great editorial and journalistic stories, experiential stories written by experienced founders and influencers provide the most value to founders of growing companies out to create an impact. Over this year we plan to bring in over 1000 new such domain experts on Inc42.
The startup is looking to use these newly raised funds to build out the technology arm of the company and bring in new formats in the online reading space. Talking about the same, CEO Vaibhav Agarwal says,
We will continue to experiment and bring new formats, be it in the form of new channels, events, geographies or products, which will add real value to the startup community in India.
Apart from publishing entrepreneurial stories and news, Inc42 also runs a couple of its own events series — a common revenue earning source in this domain. These events include Pulse42, StartupPulse and a few mixers which it organises on a periodic basis, to help connect the overall entrepreneurial community.
The startup is also looking to bring in newer products in this space. Utkarsh Agarwal, Product head at Inc42, says,
A number of announcements are due on some of our products that are already running in a closed alpha for a small selected set of users.
This fresh backing for the Asian digital media space continues to beam out strong signals of growing investor interest in the segment, specially in the Asian region and more specifically in the timeframe of past one year. In India alone, apart from us good folks here at The Tech Portal, YourStory received an undisclosed Series A backing from T V Mohandas Pai, Ratan Tata and others, while VCCircle saw itself getting acquired by NewsCorp for an undisclosed amount.
In the Asian region as a whole, number of blogs, like Tech In Asia, finance focused Deal Street Asia and entrepreneurial stories focused e27 too received backing from notable investors.
It will be interesting to see how this space pans out, considering the growing number of publications. And while there a only a few good publications, the market opportunity is huge — 70% of India alone is yet to come online, while those who already are — hardly read tech or entrepreneurial stuff.
