Indian startup Eloelo has raised USD 80 million in a Series C round from Hornbill Capital and NBCUniversal. The round takes its total funding to USD 130 million and values the company at USD 500 million.
Eloelo runs Story TV, one of India's top microdrama apps, which has more than 33 million active users, according to Sensor Tower data cited by TechCrunch.
The company plans to use the money to build more original titles and grow its AI and machine learning research team. Microdramas are short, serialized videos made for phones.
Also Read: Indian Startup Eloelo Unveils AI Tool that Turns Scripts into Videos
Founded in 2020 by former Flipkart executive Saurabh Pandey, Story TV has a library of over 5,000 titles in six languages. Pandey told TechCrunch that users spend about 95 minutes a day on the app, spread across several sessions.
He believes the next billion users will watch content mostly on their phones, in short slots through the day. Earlier tools, he said, handled short clips well, but "serialized storytelling was never solved."
On AI, he compares the technology to a fast race car engine that needs a skilled driver, which he says is the creative director or showrunner.
The company's Dolphin AI platform started as an internal video tool and may soon open to the public, with templates and models for images, audio and video.
More than 118 million people watch microdramas in India every month, and analysts expect the industry to reach USD 3 billion to USD 4 billion in annual revenue by 2030. Even so, getting people to pay is hard.
A Redseer report says over 40 million people have paid for microdramas at least once, but only 15 million to 17 million pay every month. A separate Ormax Media survey found that 72% of viewers have never paid.
Story TV offers monthly, quarterly and yearly subscriptions, along with some ad-supported free content. Eloelo also runs a learning app called Master and an AI companion app called Voxy AI.