India’s top accelerator and integrated incubator for start-ups Venture Catalysts will be investing Rs 8.5 crore in OTT platform STAGE, an Indore based start-up and the world’s first OTT platform for stand-up art forms in local dialects.
STAGE specializes as an Indian language OTT platform that allows the artists to create local standup content for poetry, comedy, or storytelling for the local audience in their local context and dialects and allows them to distribute and monetize their content.
The history of STAGE goes back to 2014 when the trio of Shashank Vaishnav, Vinay Singhal, and Parveen Singhal decided to create a sub-space in Witty Feed to venture into giving a platform dedicated to stand-up contents called InnerVoice and the success of which led to STAGE in 2019.
The market potential for the platform is estimated to be 450 million and the company is expected to increase content generation and move out of the pre-revenue stage that they’re currently in and start monetizing their subscription by January 2021.
Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, the President and Co-Founder of Venture Catalysts told that STAGE’s necessary arrangement of encounters added to their repertoire in substance creation and utilizing innovation to adapt substance will assist them with building a beneficial business. They made their mark as being the second largest content creators in the world and that it wouldn’t be long until STAGE will get comparable accomplishments in the country.
The company’s founder Vinay Singhal told that the investment will aid them in increasing the rate at which content is created and to reach an enhanced 2 million users.
Sushma Kaushik, Partner at Aavishkaar, Sachin Bhatia– The Co-founder of Bulbul.tv and a former co-founder of MakeMyTrip, and Vishal Maheshwari-India Head of VIU OTT platform were other investors that participated in the funding round.
