Startup Deep Dive : Pratilipi — revenue grew 300x after one pivot, then the valuation was cut in half

Pratilipi spent six years building one of India’s largest communities of readers and writers in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and eight other Indian languages before it earned any meaningful money from them: in the fiscal year ending March 2021, the company’s revenue from operations was just ₹0.19 crore (roughly $20,000, at the ₹96-to-the-dollar rate used throughout this piece) against a net loss of ₹96 crore. Three years and one monetisation pivot later, annual revenue had grown more than 300 times over, to ₹58 crore in FY24 — even as the company was, in a separate move, quietly cutting its own valuation in half.

This is the story of the self-publishing and storytelling platform built by Nasadiya Technologies, backed at various points by Tencent, Krafton and Omidyar Network, which survived a competitive assault from ShareChat and TikTok-era apps, found a business model only after it was forced to ask readers to pay, and is now betting on comics, audiobooks and AI-assisted vertical microdramas to justify an initial public offering it has told investors it wants to launch in 2026.

Quick facts

What they do

Pratilipi sells access to stories in Indian languages, to two different customers on the same platform. Writers get free publishing tools, a built-in audience and, since October 2021, ways to earn directly from readers; readers get a mix of free and paywalled fiction, poetry and essays across twelve languages including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Around that core text product, the company has built a wider content group: Pratilipi FM for audio drama and podcasts, Pratilipi Comics for serialised graphic fiction, Westland Books for print publishing, IVM Podcasts (acquired in 2020) for spoken-word audio, and, most recently, Double Tap Films for short vertical “microdrama” video. The common thread across all five is the same underlying catalogue: stories originated by Pratilipi’s writer community, then re-packaged and licensed into whichever format — book, audiobook, comic, web series or two-minute video episode — a given audience actually wants to consume them in.

The origin

Ranjeet Pratap Singh left his job as an area sales manager at Vodafone in Ahmedabad because, by his own account, he no longer felt he was pushing himself or creating real impact. He spent time travelling before deciding what to build next, and landed on a specific gap: India had enormous numbers of people who read and wrote in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and other Indian languages, but almost no accessible, affordable digital catalogue for them, unlike the English-language market. In September 2014 he launched what became Pratilipi with four co-founders — Prashant Gupta, Rahul Ranjan, Sahradayi Modi and Sankaranarayanan Devarajan — under the entity Nasadiya Technologies, formally incorporated in March 2015. Most of the founding team, including Singh, Modi and Devarajan, had come out of Vodafone, which is a notably un-literary background for a publishing startup; what they shared instead was direct experience of how large India’s non-English-speaking, non-metro market actually is, and how badly it was served by the existing book trade. The founding thesis was simple: build a free, open platform where anyone could publish in their own language and anyone could read for nothing, and work out monetisation later.

The struggle years

“Work out monetisation later” turned into several genuinely difficult years. The first serious threat came in 2018 and 2019, when India’s regional-content market was flooded with venture money aimed at short-form video and social apps rather than text: ShareChat was raising rounds worth $100 million at a time, and ByteDance’s Helo and TikTok were pouring subsidised growth spending into the same non-English, non-metro users Pratilipi depended on. Several text and content rivals could not survive the resulting spike in customer-acquisition costs. Pratilipi did, largely because it occupied a category none of the video-first apps were contesting — no other platform with a comparable user base was offering full-length books and stories in Indian languages — but as late as January 2020, with roughly 160,000 writers and 8.5 million monthly readers on the platform, the company still had, in its own co-founder’s words, “a question mark on monetisation.” That question mark showed up starkly in the accounts: for the fiscal year ended March 2021, Pratilipi’s revenue from operations was just ₹0.19 crore against a net loss of ₹96 crore, according to Inc42’s review of its regulatory filings — a company with millions of active users and, by that point, tens of millions of dollars in venture funding behind it, still earning next to nothing from any of them.

The turning point

The inflection arrived in October 2021, when Pratilipi rolled out its first real monetisation stack: virtual gifts that readers could send to writers, “Superfan” subscriptions that let readers pay a monthly fee to a specific author for early access and exclusive interaction, and a platform-wide “Pratilipi Premium” subscription. The company reported that in that first month alone, writers collectively earned more than ₹24 lakh, with roughly 28,000 active paying subscribers already on the Superfan programme and more than ₹5 crore paid out in virtual gifts cumulatively by that point. The full-year numbers show how sharply that changed the business: operating revenue for FY22 (the year in which the October 2021 launch fell) jumped 41.5 times, from ₹0.19 crore in FY21 to ₹7.88 crore, with subscriptions contributing ₹3.14 crore and brand advertising ₹2.31 crore of that total, as reported by Inc42. Losses grew too — to ₹196.44 crore in FY22, more than double FY21’s ₹96.19 crore — because the company was simultaneously investing in the new formats (comics, audio, podcasts) that would need this monetisation engine to eventually pay for themselves. But for the first time in its history, Pratilipi had a revenue line that was compounding rather than flat, and every fiscal year since has built directly on the pricing and subscription mechanics introduced that October.

The money behind it

Pratilipi has raised roughly $100-105 million in disclosed funding across nine rounds since 2015, according to Inc42’s April 2025 tally (about $101.7 million) and PitchBook’s separate estimate (about $104 million). The shape of that funding:

• Seed: ₹30 lakh from TLabs, Times Internet’s accelerator programme, in March 2015.
• 2016: $1 million led by Nexus Venture Partners, the company’s first institutional round.
• Series A: $4.3 million in February 2018, led by Omidyar Network.
• Series B: $15 million in June 2019, led by Qiming Venture Partners, with Nexus Venture Partners, Omidyar Network, Shunwei Capital, Contrarian Vriddhi Fund and WEH Ventures participating.
• Series C: about ₹76 crore (roughly $10 million) in April 2020, led by Tencent.
• Series D: $48 million in July 2021, led by Krafton Inc (maker of PUBG), with Omidyar Network and a group of startup-founder angels including Gaurav Munjal and Hemesh Singh of Unacademy, Sahil Barua of Delhivery, Nishith Rastogi of Locus and Vidit Aatrey of Meesho — a round that valued the company at about $265 million.
• Series E: $20 million in April 2025 ($12 million primary, $8 million secondary), led by Jungle Ventures, at a post-money valuation of $100 million.

Each of the three largest institutional backers changed something specific about the company. Nexus Venture Partners’ 2016 round was the first outside validation of a text-only, pre-monetisation vernacular platform, at a time when most Indian venture money was chasing e-commerce. Krafton’s 2021 investment brought both capital and a strategic thesis: the gaming company said it saw value in Indian-language intellectual property that could eventually be adapted into audio, comics, games and film, and pushed Pratilipi toward overseas expansion and format diversification. Jungle Ventures’ 2025 round was explicitly framed, by Singh, as the company’s final primary fundraise before an IPO — but it came at less than half the 2021 valuation, and included Qiming Venture Partners selling 75-80% of its shares and Shunwei Capital exiting its position entirely through secondary sales, as reported by Entrackr and Venture Intelligence.

How it makes money

Money comes in through four channels:

• Content and premium subscriptions: platform-wide Pratilipi Premium plans, plus per-author Superfan subscriptions and virtual-gift purchases; this was ₹34.97 crore in FY24, up 2x year-on-year, and 60.5% of operating revenue, per Entrackr’s review of the company’s filings.
• Brand advertising: ₹7.53 crore in FY24, up 79% year-on-year (Entrackr).
• Book sales and publishing, chiefly through Westland Books: ₹10.62 crore in FY24, up 62% year-on-year (Entrackr).
• IP licensing: story rights sold for television, OTT and film adaptation, a channel the company says it began actively pursuing from October 2023, plus, from 2026, licensing of short “microdrama” video series through Double Tap Films to platforms including Amazon Prime Video, MX Player, Hungama OTT and, internationally, TikTok.

Money goes out mainly on two lines: creator payouts (the company has said it pays out more than ₹1 crore a month in royalties in some months) and employee costs, which were ₹46.94 crore in FY24, down 21% year-on-year as the company tightened spending, per Entrackr. On unit economics, Pratilipi’s own FY24 numbers show it spent ₹2.02 for every ₹1 of revenue earned, with an EBITDA margin of -89.7% and return on capital employed of -81.0% that year — deeply loss-making, but a sharp improvement on FY23, when the loss-to-revenue ratio was far worse. The part people tend to get wrong is treating Pratilipi as an advertising-funded, Wattpad-style free app: by FY24, advertising was under 13% of operating revenue, while content and subscriptions plus book sales made up more than 85% between them — this is now a company that earns most of its money by getting people to pay directly for stories, not by selling their attention to brands.

The numbers

All figures below are operating revenue and net loss as reported in Pratilipi’s regulatory filings and covered by Entrackr, except FY26, which is a company-reported figure disclosed ahead of its planned IPO and not yet independently verified against an audited filing.

The pattern is a company that has cut its loss every year since FY22 while growing revenue every year since FY21, but the rate of loss reduction has slowed sharply: the FY23-to-FY24 improvement was 62%, FY24-to-FY25 was only about 13%, and the FY26 company-reported figure implies a further improvement of roughly 11% on a revenue base that more than doubled. In other words, revenue growth is now doing more of the work of narrowing the loss than cost control is — which is a reasonable growth story to tell ahead of an IPO, but also means the FY26 numbers deserve the same scrutiny as any other unaudited, company-supplied figure until a prospectus makes them official.

Where the money comes from

Pratilipi does not publish a full geographic revenue split, since the overwhelming majority of its readers and writers are in India, but two other splits are informative:

• By revenue line (FY24): content and subscriptions 60.5%, book sales/publishing 18.3%, brand advertising 13.0%, other income 1.2% — content monetisation has gone from a rounding error in FY21 to the clear majority of revenue in three years (Entrackr).
• By user behaviour (FY26, company-reported): about 3.8 million monthly active users, 1.8 million daily active users, with 17% of monthly active users paying for something and 21% making at least one payment a month — a far higher conversion rate than the company’s FY24 base of roughly 2.5 million app monthly active users implied, suggesting the paying base has grown faster than the overall audience (Entrackr).
• By format (2026): the surprise is how much of the newest growth line, Double Tap Films, is aimed outside India altogether — its microdrama catalogue, built from stories already owned by Pratilipi, reached US, Canadian, Brazilian and Japanese audiences through a TikTok licensing deal struck in May 2026, barely a month after the studio’s April 2026 launch, per Storyboard18 and Medianews4u.

The risks

• Persistent cash burn on a thin balance sheet. Pratilipi has posted a net loss every year since at least FY21, and its cash and bank balance stood at just ₹2.3 crore at the end of FY24 against current assets of ₹33.3 crore, per Entrackr’s review of its filings — a company that still needs regular external funding or a sustained, fast improvement in operating cash flow to keep operating at its current scale.
• A down round ahead of the IPO it is counting on. The April 2025 Series E valued Pratilipi at $100 million, less than half its $265 million valuation from July 2021, and came with two early backers, Qiming Venture Partners and Shunwei Capital, selling most or all of their stakes rather than continuing to hold. A company hoping to list at a meaningfully higher valuation in 2026 will need to show public-market investors a growth and margin story strong enough to reverse that direction, not just repeat it.
• Crowding in the one format growing fastest. Short vertical “microdrama” video, the category Pratilipi is now entering through Double Tap Films, is simultaneously being entered by far larger platforms — Meta, YouTube, JioStar and ShareChat among them, per Storyboard18’s coverage of the segment. Pratilipi’s own studio head has publicly warned that roughly 80% of microdrama apps will fail by trying to monetise before they build viewing habits, a caution that applies as much to Pratilipi’s own new bet as to any rival’s.

The takeaway

Pratilipi’s most transferable lesson is not that vernacular content was an underserved market — plenty of founders correctly spotted that. It is that spotting the gap and building the community were, on their own, worth almost nothing in revenue terms for the better part of a decade, and that the free-first strategy which built the audience had to be actively and deliberately reversed, in a single product decision in October 2021, before any of that audience turned into a business. The company that survived the 2018-2019 ShareChat-and-TikTok scramble by refusing to compete on video did not get rewarded for that patience until it stopped being purely patient and started charging. Founders sitting on a large, engaged, monetisation-free user base should take from this that scale and revenue are not the same asset, and that the discomfort of finally asking a loyal free audience to pay is usually smaller, and arrives later, than it should.

Frequently asked questions

What is Pratilipi and who founded it?

Pratilipi is a self-publishing and storytelling platform for Indian-language content, operated by Nasadiya Technologies. It was founded in September 2014 in Bengaluru by Ranjeet Pratap Singh, Prashant Gupta, Rahul Ranjan, Sahradayi Modi and Sankaranarayanan Devarajan, and formally incorporated in March 2015.

How much funding has Pratilipi raised, and at what valuation?

Pratilipi has raised roughly $100-105 million across nine disclosed rounds since 2015, per Inc42 and PitchBook. Its most recent round, a $20 million Series E in April 2025 led by Jungle Ventures, valued the company at $100 million, down from $265 million after its July 2021 Series D led by Krafton.

Is Pratilipi profitable?

No. It reported a net loss of ₹50.4 crore in FY25 on operating revenue of ₹82.4 crore, per Entrackr’s review of its regulatory filings. The company has told media its FY26 loss narrowed further to about ₹45 crore on revenue of ₹186 crore, but that figure is company-reported and not yet independently verified.

How does Pratilipi make money?

Mainly through content and premium subscriptions (60.5% of FY24 operating revenue), book sales via its Westland Books publishing arm, brand advertising, and, increasingly, licensing its story catalogue for television, OTT, film and short vertical-video adaptations.

Is Pratilipi planning an IPO?

Yes. The company has said it intends its April 2025 Series E to be its last primary fundraising round before an IPO it is targeting for 2026, as reported by Inc42 and Entrackr, though no listing venue or date has been formally announced.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Inc42, “Pratilipi’s Operating Revenue Surges To INR 8 Cr In FY22, Loss Doubles To INR 196 Cr”, 2022
• Entrackr, “Pratilipi approaches Rs 60 Cr revenue mark in FY24, cuts losses by 62%”, 27 November 2024
• Entrackr, “Pratilipi claims revenue more than doubled to Rs 185 Cr in FY26”, 22 May 2026
• Entrackr, “Pratilipi raises $20 Mn in Series E led by Jungle Ventures”, April 2025
• Venture Intelligence, “Publishing platform Pratilipi attracts $20-M in down round led by Jungle Ventures; 2 Chinese investors exit”, April 2025
• YourStory, “Storytelling app Pratilipi bags $20M in Series E funding led by Jungle Ventures”, April 2025
• Inc42, “Pratilipi — Funding, Revenue & Investors”, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Pratilipi Built A Content Universe; Will Profitability Follow?”, 2025
• TechCrunch, “Pratilipi, a ‘YouTube for writers’ storytelling platform in India, raises $15 million”, 6 June 2019
• DealStreetAsia, “China’s Qiming Venture Partners leads $15.2m investment in Indian firm Pratilipi”, June 2019
• KrAsia, “PUBG creator Krafton leads USD 48 million Series D round in local storytelling platform Pratilipi”, July 2021
• The Tech Portal, “Storytelling platform Pratilipi raises $48Mn led by game-maker Krafton to expand in house publishing wing”, 14 July 2021
• Entrepreneur India, “This Co-founder Ensured That His Regional Language Content App Survived the Storm”, 22 January 2020
• SmartStateIndia, “Pratilipi launches monetization features; authors earn over 24 lakhs in the month of October”, 18 November 2021
• Storyboard18, “Stop chasing subscriptions: Pratilipi’s Sharlton Menezes says 80% of microdrama apps will fail trying to monetise too soon”, 2026
• Storyboard18, “Pratilipi’s Double Tap Films launches microdramas on Flipkart”, 2026
• Wikipedia, “Pratilipi”, accessed September 2026

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.