New Delhi-based YKA Media Pvt Ltd, which owns online news and views platform Youth Ki Awaaz, has secured Rs 4 crore ($600,000) in an angel round of funding from Quintillion Media, cross-platform digital content venture co-founded by former Network18 promoters Raghav Bahl and Ritu Kapur.
The startup will use the funding to expand the team and tech besides building a long-term business model, it said.
Started by Anshul Tewari, Youth Ki Awaaz (voice of the young) is a crowd-sourced digital media company which aims to break the top-down, one-way approach of traditional media, making news creation and dissemination a collaborative, community-led model.
From analysis and opinions on politics, to the latest on art and culture, the YKA platform is a mix of personal stories, issue-centric writing and rights based interventions.
“The last one year has seen a sudden rise in digital news and opinion platforms. With millions of dollars pouring into new startups, the growth is phenomenal. However, similar to traditional media, digital media too seems to be veering away from being people-focused. YKA, on the other hand, is a completely people driven digital media platform,†said Tewari.
As part of the deal, Ritu Kapur (wife of Bahl), will join the board of the YKA Media.
The website claims to receive over a million readers a month and has contributions from over 30,000 writers from across the world.
For Quintillion, this is the second deal in the digital space in as many months. Last month it backed Sheroes.in, a jobs and career community for women, along with a clutch of prominent early-stage investors including Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Google India head Rajan Anandan and Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal.
Quintillion Media also operates the digital content platform, ‘The Quint’.
BMR Advisors acted as transaction advisors to Quintillion Media, while Novistra Capital acted as transaction advisors to Youth Ki Awaaz.