Serum Institute of India’s chief Adar Poonawalla has picked up a 20% stake in Wakau Interactive Pvt Ltd, a subsidiary of JetSynthesys Pvt Ltd, a new-age digital content and technology company.
The community-driven social media platform Wakau offers a unique combination of mobile-first screen experience and short video content in the entertainment and fashion domains with an associated video-commerce element.
Poonawalla joins veteran Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan as Wakau’s investor.
Pune-based Indian gaming firm JetSynthesys, part of the diversified JetLine Group of Companies, counts the family offices of Poonawalla and Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, promoters of entities such as engineering company Thermax, diversified manufacturer Triveni Group, and the DSP Group. as its investors.
“New content formats like short entertainment and fashion videos are gaining wide scale popularity and Wakau, leveraging its advanced AI based tech stack has made it so easy, creative, fun and safe for consumers with its high levels of personalization. I’d like to congratulate the team on the AI award and am delighted to join this juggernaut of possibilities with Wakau as it sets off on its next phase of growth,” said Adar Poonawalla, Chief Executive Officer of the Serum Institute of India.
Currently, Wakau claims to have more than five lakh daily user engagement events with personalization and high regional focus on content curation. On its platform, it has more than four lakh curated user-generated videos, a song library featuring over 10,000 curated regional and main media songs for short video along with 25,000 plus named birthday songs for personalised greeting creations.
The platform's offerings can serve one million plus users concurrently, sees 5000+ daily video uploads, and is scalable with ease, all thanks to the superior tech stack it’s been built on, the firm said.
Spanning three key verticals – gaming, digital entertainment, and interest-based social community platforms, JetSynthesys leverages advanced capabilities in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, blockchain and AR/VR to leverage the digital ecosystem of India.
The digital content firm was the earliest entrant in India’s e-sports industry, having had a 50% founding stake in India’s largest esports company, Nodwin Gaming. In addition, JetSynthesys recently acquired Chennai-based Skyesports to form Jet Skyesports to build esports at the grass-root level. JetSynthesys also owns 100% of India's largest cricket simulation games like Real Cricket and Sachin Saga, engaging over 100 million gamers worldwide.
“We created Wakau with one goal, to entertain users and promote creativity. It empowers the creator community with both distribution and monetization of content through new-age mechanisms like NFTs. Short video sharing social media platforms have been seeing great traction from users since the last couple of years,” said Rajan Navani, Vice Chairman & Managing Director, JetSynthesys.