Shekhar Gupta’s multimedia digital news platform, ThePrint has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Infosys co-founders N.R Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani, industrialist Ratan Tata, Uday Kotak Family, Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Bangalore-based tech entrepreneur Rajiv C. Mody, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, chairman of LVMH Asia Ravi Thakran, and IIFL founders Nirmal Jain, R. Venkatraman, Karan Bhagat and Yatin Shah. This was first reported by Livemint back in May this year. Now ThePrint has officially announced the funding.
A spokesperson for ThePrint told MediaNama that the funds will be primarily used for content creation, and a part of it will be utilised in hiring more people as they haven’t reached full-capacity yet. The Livemint report mentions that the investors will together hold about a 20% stake in Printline Media Pvt. Ltd., which runs ThePrint, with the remaining stake being held by Gupta.
ThePrint was co-founded by Shekhar Gupta, ex-Indian Express editor and Barkha Dutt, ex-NDTV group editor, in January 2016. Since then, Dutt has moved on from the company. The company used to produce and telecast a monthly series called #OffTheCuff on NDTV 24×7 and NDTV Profit/Prime, which is now available on ThePrint’s Facebook page and YouTube page.
Prior to starting ThePrint, Gupta had founded Mediascape Pvt Limited in December 2015. The plan was to launch products for the television, digital and print media in the news genre, starting with producing two new television shows for NDTV’s English news channel. Note that Gupta also hosts NDTV’s Walk the Talk interview show.
Competition
Over the past few years a number of digital news outlets have launched, making the digital media space quite crowded: There is Omidyar Network-backed Scroll.in, Atlantic Media’s mobile-first digital publication Quartz, which was incidentally launched in India in partnership with Scroll.in, Raghav Bahl’s mobile-focused news venture The Quint, Quintillion Media-backed online publication The News Minute, political news and analysis website Newslaundry (it has a paywall section and is also funded by Omidyar Network), subscription based online media publication The Ken, Siddharth Varadarajan and Sidharth Bhatia founded online news publication The Wire (it has a separate Hindi site), The Patrika Group’s online news venture Catch (also has a Hindi version), and Govindraj Ethiraj’s data centric news & analysis portal IndiaSpend.com, among others.
Well-known international digital publications like The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Mashable also launched India editions in 2015 – Buzzfeed in August, Mashable in November, and The Huffington Post in December.
*Shekhar Gupta’s name was spelled incorrectly in the headline. It has been fixed now.
