Bharti Airtel said it has acquired a strategic stake in Juggernaut Books, a popular digital epublishing platform.
Telecom companies in India are busy building or buying content companies in an effort to offer their own content on their networks.
“The investment is in line with Airtel’s endeavour to build an open content ecosystem and bring world-class digital content to its customers,” the company said.
The investment from Airtel will enable Juggernaut to ramp up content acquisition, digital marketing and prepare for a subscription offering launch in the next few months.
Badal Bagri, Chief Financial Officer, Bharti Airtel said, “Juggernaut is an exciting digital platform and complements our content vision. We look forward to working with them and supporting the next phase of their growth journey.”
Speaking of the fund raise, the founder & publisher, Chiki Sarkar said, “We are excited to partner with Airtel in our journey ahead. Airtel has a great understanding of digital content consumption and we have much to learn and benefit from this strategic partnership”.
“Our ambition is to get many more Indians to read & write and our partnership with Airtel will allow us to expand our distribution manifold”, CEO, Simran Khara.
Juggernaut’s former investors include Infosys co-founder and current chairman, Nandan Nilekani and Boston Consulting Group India CEO Neeraj Aggarwal.
Launched in April 2016, the platform has close to 1 million downloads across android and ioS.
In May 2017, the writer’s platform went live to offer amateur writers the ability to digitally publish their content and stand a chance to win publishing contracts. The writer’s platform in the past six months has received just under 500 stories with 9 of them securing publishing contracts.
The telecom regulator recent recommended to the government that telecom companies should not be allowed to manipulate traffic to favor apps, websites or services owned by them.