Growthword Digital Private Limited, the holding company of technology news portal iamWire, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from China-based investors and high net worth individuals in India. The investment will be in return for a minority stake in the company.
The round was led by Beijing-based Li Tao (founder and CEO of APUS Group), Li Jian (founder of Draphant Consultant), Nitin Garg, Saurabh Agarwal and Mohit Gupta (directors in Delhi-based Coinmen Consulting). The company plans to use the raised capital for building scalable technology for startups, while a part of the funds will also be utilized to innovate on content to further grow the community.
“We do cover the startup space and ecommerce in India. We recently launched a startup catalog where founders can connect with investors. The idea is that we can provide them with very objective information that professionals can utilize and startups can use the funding platform,” iamWire co-founder and COO Sugandh Dhawal told MediaNama. “So now we’re actually becoming a technology company now,” she added. iamWire is currently a 15 member team, the company claims that over 1,500 startups from around the globe have signed up on its startup database section as of now.
iamWire was started in 2011 and was incubated by Wirefoot India Technology Private Limited, a technology consulting & incubating firm. In March 2015, Growthword Digital Private Limited was founded by Abhinav Dinesh and Sugandh Dhawan. Growthworld’s other portfolio companies include Hotify, a personalized news curation app and Comezzo, a content marketing & native ad-tech company.
Other news portals
– Earlier this month, media company YourStory raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a Series A round of funding led by Kalaari Capital and with participation from Qualcomm Ventures, TV Mohandas Pai and Ratan Tata. YourStory will use the funds to launch a tech portal that will publish original stories in various Indian languages starting with Telugu, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada and Tamil.
– In May, former editor of The Hindu Siddharth Varadarajan and one of the founding editors of DNA Sidharth Bhatia launched an online news publication called The Wire. The platform had said then that it was looking to raise Rs 10-12 crore in the next six months.
– In June, Rajasthan Patrika publisher The Patrika Group launched its first English news website called Catch, a month after it announced it would. The Patrika Group claimed that Catch would report on everyday policies and events with a focus on public interest.
– In March, media entrepreneur, Raghav Bahl’s Quintillion Media’s mobile-focused digital venture The Quint went live. Earlier in January, The Quint had started publishing stories on Facebook as a preview to the new service. The website publishes news and analysis across various categories like politics, technology, entertainment, business and sports.
– Well-known international digital publications like The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed also launched India editions last year – Buzzfeed in August and The Huffington Post in December. Interestingly, former Quartz India editor Sruthijith KK was appointed editor of Huffington Post India.
Disclosure: Editorially, iamWire and MediaNama are competitors while covering the startup space and digital news
