Startup Deep Dive : STAGE — a Rs 3 crore Shark Tank pitch is now an Rs 111 crore dialect OTT business

In November 2018, Facebook quietly changed how its News Feed ranked publisher pages, and a Indore-based content company called WittyFeed watched its distribution disappear almost overnight. Seven years and one pivot later, the same three founders run STAGE, a dialect-language streaming platform that closed FY25 with ₹111 crore (about $11.6 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) in revenue — and still lost ₹28 crore doing it.

The contradiction sits at the centre of the story: a platform built for audiences that mainstream OTT apps treat as an afterthought was valued at ₹250 crore on Shark Tank India in 2022, and by December 2024 investors had marked it up to roughly ₹674 crore, even though the company spends more on advertising alone than it earns in revenue. What changed in between is a smaller, less glamorous fix than the pitch-day story suggests.

Quick facts

What they do

STAGE runs a paid streaming app built entirely around India’s local dialects rather than its scheduled languages — it started with Haryanvi and Rajasthani and has since added Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Marathi and Bengali content, according to Agency Reporter’s June 2026 market breakdown. Its catalogue is web series, stand-up comedy, folk drama and poetry shot for audiences in small-town Haryana, Rajasthan and the Hindi-Bhojpuri belt — viewers that Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and even Hindi general-entertainment channels rarely commission for directly. The app is distributed both directly and through partners: Tata Play Binge added STAGE as a bundled app for its set-top-box subscribers in Haryana and Rajasthan from 8 January 2024, per Afaqs’s report of the deal, giving the platform a distribution route beyond its own app downloads.

The origin

The three founders — Vinay Singhal, his brother Praveen Singhal, and Shashank Vaishnav — had worked together since their student days at SRM University and, in 2014, built WittyFeed, an Indian answer to BuzzFeed-style viral content. It scaled fast: by 2017 it employed about 90 people and had grown into a roughly ₹40 crore-revenue business reaching, by the founders’ own account, over 120 million monthly users, as reported by Business Remedies. Almost all of that reach ran through Facebook pages. When Facebook changed its News Feed algorithm and pulled WittyFeed’s pages in November 2018, according to Inc42’s reporting (corroborated by Business Remedies, which dates the same event to “end of 2018”), the company’s entire distribution channel vanished within weeks, and revenue collapsed with it. The founders have said they kept paying staff out of dwindling reserves and offered some employees delayed salaries in exchange for equity rather than shutting down immediately. STAGE, launched on 1 November 2019 after what Business Remedies describes as six months of introspection, was the second act: a bet that owning a niche language audience directly — rather than renting reach from a platform algorithm — was the more defensible business.

The struggle years

The Facebook collapse of November 2018 was the first near-death moment, and it forced the founders to abandon a business built entirely on borrowed distribution. The second was quieter but nearly as damaging: STAGE’s early growth engine did not work on ordinary unit economics. Around the time of its Shark Tank India pitch, filmed in 2022, the company reported roughly 130,000 paying subscribers on a ₹400-a-year plan, monthly revenue of about ₹25 lakh, and a prior full year of revenue of about ₹3.85 crore, alongside a monthly cash burn of roughly ₹1.1 crore, according to a Shark Tank India recap on startuparticle.com. Acquiring a subscriber was expensive relative to what a ₹400 annual plan could recover, and by Inc42’s account the company’s customer acquisition cost climbed as high as ₹6,000 per paid subscriber in its early funnel before a 2023 fix — a level that, against a few hundred rupees of annual revenue per user, could not scale without either much higher prices or a change in the funnel itself. Both crises shared a root cause: a growth model that depended on someone else’s cost structure, first Facebook’s free reach, then an expensive, high-friction sign-up funnel.

The turning point

The fix, per Inc42’s reporting, arrived in mid-2023: instead of asking a first-time visitor to commit to a ₹199 quarterly or ₹349 annual plan upfront, STAGE introduced a ₹1, seven-day trial billed through UPI autopay, so the subscription renewed automatically unless the user cancelled. On one side of that change sat a customer acquisition cost of about ₹6,000 and a funnel that struggled to convert; on the other, Inc42 reports a customer acquisition cost near ₹250 and roughly 80% retention among trial users who converted. The effect shows up directly in the financials: revenue from operations went from about ₹3 crore in FY23 to ₹18 crore in FY24 to ₹111 crore in FY25, a 6.2-times jump in the most recent year alone, as per Entrackr’s analysis of the company’s regulatory filings. The Shark Tank India appearance itself — where Aman Gupta, Namita Thapar and Peyush Bansal jointly offered ₹1.5 crore for 0.6% equity plus ₹1.5 crore as debt at 18% interest, valuing the company at about ₹250 crore, confirmed independently by Business Remedies and startuparticle.com — gave the platform national visibility around the same period, but the underlying funnel repair is what the numbers say actually moved revenue.

The money behind it

STAGE has raised capital in stages that roughly track its own pivot from free content library to paid, dialect-specific streaming:

• Seed: about ₹1.5 crore from Venture Catalysts, 2019 (Inc42)
• Shark Tank India deal: ₹1.5 crore in equity for 0.6% plus ₹1.5 crore in debt at 18% interest, valuing the company at about ₹250 crore — filmed 2022, aired on Season 2 (Business Remedies; startuparticle.com)
• Series A: ₹40 crore led by Blume Ventures in January 2023, with NB Ventures, Dholakia Ventures, TSM Ventures, WeFounderCircle, Mumbai Angels and existing backers Better Capital, IPV, TCA and Venture Catalysts participating; this took cumulative funding to about ₹71 crore at the time (India Entrepreneur/Inc42)
• Series B: about ₹84.6 crore (reported separately elsewhere as roughly $12.5 million), closed around December 2024 and co-led by Goodwater Capital (₹41.95 crore) and Blume Ventures (₹26 crore), at a post-money valuation of about ₹674 crore, per Entrackr’s review of the company’s Registrar of Companies filing

What each backer changed, by the companies’ and Entrackr’s own account: Venture Catalysts’ seed money funded the original content library; the Shark Tank sharks’ cheque came with national television reach rather than just capital; Blume Ventures led the Series A that funded deeper content production in Haryana and Rajasthan and, by the Series B, held the largest outside stake at about 13.0%; Goodwater Capital’s Series B lead brought a consumer-internet investor with experience backing subscription apps outside India. Total capital raised is reported inconsistently across sources — Entrackr’s Series B story put the cumulative figure at about $19 million as of December 2024, while its later FY25 financial review cited roughly $24 million — a range this piece flags rather than resolves.

How it makes money

STAGE is almost entirely a subscription business, not an advertising one:

• Subscription revenue made up about ₹110 crore of the company’s ₹111 crore FY25 revenue from operations — roughly 99% — with the remainder from marketing and promotional income (Entrackr)
• Plans run at ₹199 for a quarter or ₹349 for a year, with a ₹1, seven-day trial as the entry point since mid-2023, billed through UPI autopay so it renews automatically (Inc42)
• The biggest cost line is not content but customer acquisition: advertising expenses were ₹115 crore in FY25, about 82% of the company’s ₹141 crore total expenditure, up roughly four times from ₹27 crore in FY24 (Entrackr)
• Content acquisition costs were comparatively small, at ₹1.7 crore in FY25, though per-title production budgets have risen from about ₹4–5 lakh in FY23–24 to about ₹25 lakh currently, according to Inc42
• Employee benefit expenses doubled year-on-year to about ₹12 crore in FY25, alongside roughly ₹9.3 crore in legal, administrative and other costs and ₹3 crore in depreciation (Entrackr)

The part people tend to get wrong: a platform this specific in language and geography looks like a content business, but its FY25 cost structure says it is really a performance-marketing business that happens to sell dialect entertainment — four out of every five rupees of expense went to advertising, not to making shows.

The numbers

Figures below are revenue from operations and net loss as reported in the company’s financial filings and reviewed by Entrackr; all figures in ₹ crore.

• Cost to earn one rupee of revenue improved from ₹2.28 in FY24 to ₹1.27 in FY25, still above breakeven (Entrackr)
• FY25 EBITDA margin was about -24.05% and return on capital employed about -48.69% (Entrackr)
• Cash and bank balance stood at about ₹69 crore as of March 2025, against current assets of about ₹83 crore (Entrackr)
• Total paying subscribers were reported at 4.4 million-plus with 20 million total users as of the FY25 close (Entrackr); the company has separately claimed 5 million paid subscribers (YourStory) — a gap this piece notes rather than resolves
• Headcount stood at about 109 employees as of August 2025, up roughly 99% year-on-year, per workforce-data firm Revelio Labs — growth that trails the 6.2-times revenue jump over the same period

Where the money comes from

STAGE’s original two dialects still carry most of its active audience even after expanding into four more languages:

• Haryanvi: about 166,934 monthly active subscribers, with roughly 53.4% viewing penetration in its base market, as of June 2026 (Agency Reporter)
• Rajasthani: about 143,903 monthly active subscribers, with roughly 44.5% viewing penetration, as of June 2026 (Agency Reporter)
• Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Marathi and Bengali combined: 124,000-plus monthly active subscribers as of June 2026 — smaller individually but the newest growth lines (Agency Reporter)
• Marathi, the most recently tracked market, grew from about 6,400 monthly active subscribers in April 2026 to 38,707 in June 2026 — a sixfold rise in one quarter, off a small base (Agency Reporter)
• The content library reached about 44,949 minutes (roughly 749 hours) by February 2026, up 116.5% from April 2023 (Agency Reporter)
• Total revenue growth was reported at 10.5% year-on-year in the most recently disclosed quarter, Q1 FY27 (Agency Reporter)

The surprise is less about geography than about durability: five years after launch, and two dialect markets added since, Haryanvi and Rajasthani together still dwarf the other four markets combined on active users — the expansion has added new revenue lines, but the original niche remains the core business.

The risks

• Growth is bought, not organic. Advertising consumed about 82% of FY25 operating expenses (₹115 crore of ₹141 crore) and revenue is still shy of covering it — a negative EBITDA margin of about -24.05% and negative ROCE of about -48.69% in FY25 mean the current subscriber growth rate is directly tied to continued high marketing spend, and any pullback in that spend is a plausible drag on new sign-ups (Entrackr).
• Expensive debt sits on a loss-making balance sheet. The Shark Tank India deal included ₹1.5 crore of debt at 18% interest alongside the equity cheque, per Business Remedies and startuparticle.com — a high coupon for a company that was still posting double-digit-crore annual losses years later.
• The core audience is still narrow. Even after adding Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Marathi and Bengali, Haryanvi and Rajasthani monthly actives (166,934 and 143,903 respectively, June 2026) outnumber the other four markets combined (124,000-plus), per Agency Reporter — newer markets like Marathi are growing fast off a very small base and have not yet shown they can reach similar scale.

The takeaway

The tempting version of this story is that STAGE won by spotting an underserved niche — dialect audiences that bigger platforms ignored. That framing is only half right. The company had the niche from day one in 2019 and still spent three fiscal years, and one Shark Tank appearance, without revenue that matched its ambitions. What actually moved the numbers was a change to the sign-up funnel in 2023: a ₹1 trial with autopay that cut customer acquisition cost from roughly ₹6,000 to about ₹250. A distinctive content idea earns attention; a fixable unit-economics problem is usually what decides whether that attention turns into a business. The lesson generalises beyond streaming — a defensible niche buys time, but it does not substitute for getting the cost of acquiring a customer under control.

Frequently asked questions

What does STAGE do?

STAGE is a subscription video-streaming app focused on India’s local dialects rather than its major scheduled languages. It began with Haryanvi and Rajasthani content in 2019 and has since expanded into Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Marathi and Bengali, per Agency Reporter’s June 2026 breakdown.

Who founded STAGE and when?

Vinay Singhal, Praveen Singhal and Shashank Vaishnav founded STAGE on 1 November 2019 in Indore, after their earlier venture, WittyFeed, lost its Facebook-driven distribution in November 2018, according to Inc42 and Business Remedies. Harsh Mani Tripathi later joined as a co-founder.

How much has STAGE raised, and at what valuation?

Disclosed rounds include a roughly ₹1.5 crore seed from Venture Catalysts (2019), a Shark Tank India deal valuing it at about ₹250 crore (2022), a ₹40 crore Series A led by Blume Ventures (January 2023), and a Series B of about ₹84.6 crore co-led by Goodwater Capital and Blume Ventures that valued the company at about ₹674 crore (closed around December 2024), per Entrackr and India Entrepreneur/Inc42. Total funding raised is reported inconsistently, between roughly $19 million and $24 million, across Entrackr’s own reporting.

Is STAGE profitable?

No. Entrackr’s review of the company’s financial filings shows a net loss of ₹28 crore in FY25 on revenue of ₹111 crore, following losses of ₹22 crore in FY24 and ₹23 crore in FY23. FY25’s cost-to-earn-one-rupee ratio of ₹1.27 was an improvement on FY24’s ₹2.28 but still above breakeven.

What happened when STAGE appeared on Shark Tank India?

The founders asked for ₹3 crore for 1% equity; Aman Gupta, Namita Thapar and Peyush Bansal jointly offered, and the founders accepted, ₹1.5 crore for 0.6% equity plus ₹1.5 crore in debt at 18% interest, valuing the company at about ₹250 crore, according to Business Remedies and startuparticle.com’s recaps of the episode, which aired as part of Season 2.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “How STAGE Is Shaking Up Netflix & Amazon With Its Regional Originals,” 2025
• Entrackr, “OTT platform Stage’s revenue jumps 6X to Rs 111 Cr in FY25,” September 2025
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: OTT app Stage secures $10 Mn led by Goodwater Capital,” December 2024
• Business Remedies, “The Journey of STAGE Co-Founder Vinay Singhal,” 2025
• Agency Reporter, “STAGE OTT scales revenue 6.3X in two years and takes the dialect model into 6 language markets,” 2026
• Afaqs, “Tata Play Binge to offer Haryanvi and Rajasthani content with a new app, STAGE,” January 2024
• India Entrepreneur / Inc42, “Dialect-Based OTT Platform STAGE Raises INR 40 Crore,” January 2023
• startuparticle.com, “STAGE OTT: ₹1.5 Crores for 0.6% Equity Win on Shark Tank India,” 2024
• YourStory, STAGE company profile, 2025/2026
• Revelio Labs, STAGE employee headcount data, August 2025

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