New York-based digital magazine store Magzter Inc. has raised $10 million in Series B funding led by a wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore Press Holdings Ltd (SPH). Existing investor Kalaari Capital also participated in the round. The capital raised will be used for the company’s global expansion, technological advancement, as well as for adding more tools for publishers.
"We are already present in many geographies in the UK, the US and Asia. With this capital we will focus on China, Brazil, Russia and other European countries. These geographies don’t have a leader in the segment we operate in as of now; so we want to take the number one position in these regions,†said Vijayakumar Radhakrishnan, co-founder and president, Magzter.
The startup was founded by Radhakrishnan and Girish Ramdas, and has been available in India since October 2011. It had raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding from Kalaari Capital in May last year.
Talking to Techcircle.in, Radhakrishnan shared that the platform has crossed 16 million downloads since inception and is now seeing 1 million downloads a month. It has in its library more than 3,000 magazines from over 1,000 publishers from India, Singapore, UAE (Dubai), Malaysia, the US and the UK. Hosted on Amazon’s Cloud platform, Magzter also enables publishers to digitise their publications and sell them to global users. Although the digitisation platform is free for all publishers, there is a 50-50 revenue share on sales. The company recently introduced books on the platform and has already added a few thousand books, with plans to increase this number to over a lakh in two-three months. In an earlier conversation, Radhakrishnan had shared that comics are on the anvil as well.
The platform is targeting 50 million downloads in the next couple of years. “We have a first mover advantage and our model is also unique since we have our own newsstand as well,†he said.
"Investing in Magzter is an opportunity for us to enter into yet another new platform for content delivery, and is part of our strategy to enhance content creation and distribution,†said Deborah Lee, executive vice-president, Corporate Development, SPH. A leading media organisation of Southeast Asia, SPH is available across multiple languages and platforms.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)