New Delhi: In the latest episode of 'Shark Tank India', audiences were introduced to an impressive entrepreneur trio from Haryana who had once built the massive company Wittyfeed worth Rs. 300 crores.
WittyFeed was a viral content site, second only to Buzzfeed, closed and vanished after Facebook removed it from its platform in 2018.
However, after suffering financially, the trio led by Vinay Singhal struck back with a startup names stage- which in his words is a ‘bolion ka Netflix’.
Now, in its Series A funding round, STAGE, a Shark Tank India participant from season two, has raised Rs. 40 crore. Vinay Singhal, Parveen Singhal, and Shashank Vaishnav founded the OTT platform with headquarters in Indore.
Vinay Singhal returned to his hometown after losing a business with an overnight revenue of Rs 40 crore, but doing so gave him the chance to create an OTT platform that is incredibly local and targets audiences who speak the language.
In conversation with The Better India, he said, “We found that there is no cinema or web series focused on local dialects. This is despite a large chunk of the population speaking it. In Rajasthan, about 70 million people speak Rajasthani, Marwari. Similarly, in Bihar, people speak Bhojpuri, Maithli, Angika, Bajjika. In UP, Awadhi, Braj, Bhojpuri, Bundeli, and so on and so forth".
“In Haryanvi, there are 11 different dialects. And there are around 700-800 dialects used by people across the country. There is a saying, kos-kos par badley paani, chaar kos par vaani. But these dialects remain ignored as they are not scribed,” he added.
STAGE is a hyperlocal, dialect-based OTT platform. It was established in 2019 and began with Haryanvi content. According to the portal, there are 225,000 subscribers. It had raised Rs. 31 crore prior to the Rs. 40 crore Series A, increasing the total amount raised to Rs. 71 crore.
Meanwhile, on January 4, the OTT platform in the state premiered 'Sarpanch', its first major web series. The online series focuses on political drama in small towns.