Two-year-old start-up BrizzTV Media Lab Pvt Ltd, a Bangalore-based company which develops digital media platform to bring Web content onto the television screen, has raised an undisclosed series A funding from Ojas Venture Partners.
Rajesh Srivathsa, managing director of Ojas Venture Partners confirmed the news to Techcircle.in, but declined to share the investment amount. “Brizz is still at a developmental stage and it will use the funds to develop new products and launch those in the market,” he said.
The capital, expected to last for the next 6-8 months, will also be used to ramp up hiring. Currently, the company has a team of 10 on board. Although the investment in BrizzTV took place a few months ago, it had not been formally announced.
Ojas Venture Partners is an India-focused, early-stage venture capital firm investing in technology companies. It typically invests $250,000-$1.5 million in the first round of funding and follows it up with subsequent rounds of up to $3 million. Given the investment strategy, BrizzTV could have raised around $1.5 million from Ojas.
Incubated at the NSRCEL (Nadathur S. Raghavan Center for Entrepreneurial Learning – a joint set-up of IIM Bangalore and the Department of Information Technology), BrizzTV had already received a debt grant of Rs 25 lakh from the organisation before raising the series A funding from Ojas.
BrizzTV was co-founded by three friends – Amarendra Sahu, Jitendra Jagadev and Krishnan Varadarajan. An alumnus of IIM Bangalore and NIT Karnataka, Sahu had worked with Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper Networks, Cisco and Avendus Advisors, before starting the venture. Jagadev, another NIT Karnataka pass-out, had previously worked with Philips Consumer Electronics and Cisco Systems. A BE in Computer Science from Madras University, Varadarajan had worked with companies like Indigo Technologies, Philips Software Centre and Prysm Inc, before setting up BrizzTV.
The company is also planning to foray into other South Asian countries to build requirement-specific content platforms. “For example, in China, we would probably develop a platform, which will enable the people to learn English,” said Varadarajan, one of the co-founders.
BrizzTV recently collaborated with Airtel DTH platform to launch certain programmes. “We are also in talks with other DTH operators in India to reach out to a larger student base,” added Varadarajan.
