YourStory, the Indian digital media publication which focuses on startup ecosystem has secured an undisclosed amount in series A funding led by Kalaari Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, TV Mohandas Pai and Ratan Tata.
On this event, Shradha Sharma, the founder of YourStory said,
“I am fortunate and grateful that I found them. It is with the greatest joy that I share the news that Ratan Tata, Vani Kola (Kalaari Capital), Karthee Madasamy (Qualcomm Ventures) and T V Mohandas Pai have invested in YourStory.”
YourStory was started in 2008 by Shradha in Bangalore which now employs 50 people across the organization. The website mainly focuses on covering inspiring stories of startups and entrepreneurs. It claims to have reached 60 million engaged readers and have over 20,000 stories on the website. YS have sister sites like HerStory, SocialStory, YS TV and YS Research to encourage social ventures and women entrepreneurship. The startup has also hosted over 220 events such as YS Meetups, TechSparks, MobileSparks and SheSparks across the country and helped startups to raise over $550 million though its events and campaigns.
Shradha has bootstrapped the venture for last 7 years and shared her experience throughout this journey in a blog post on YS which reads,
“Today, as we enter the month of August in 2015 and YourStory completes seven years of relentless, obsessive and passionate pursuit of telling stories, we are starting a whole new exciting chapter that includes support from some very well-known and well-respected partners. “
With the fresh round of funding, YS aims to launch a tech portal which will enable the readers to tell and share stories in their own language viz, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Bangla etc. through text, voice and video. It targets to reach to 500 million online users by 2017.
Though the exact investment amount has not been disclosed by any of the parties, but according to a report by Techcircle the investment is under $5 million. Post investment, Vani Kola from Kalaari Capital will join the boards of YourStory.
This is the 10th known investment from Ratan Tata in Indian startups. Prior to YourStory he has also backed ventures including Paytm, OLA, Snapdeal, Cardekho, Urban Ladder, Bluestone and others.
Other player in this niche, News Hunt secured investment of $40 million from Falcon Edge Capital, News In Shorts secured $20 million from Tiger Global and VCCircle got acquired by News Corp in March this year.
