- RP Sanjiv Goenka Group (RPSG), based in Kolkata, has acquired a 51 percent stake in the AI-powered Editorji news app for an undisclosed amount.
RP Sanjiv Goenka Group (RPSG), based in Kolkata, has acquired a 51 percent stake in the AI-powered Editorji news app for an undisclosed amount.
Launched by the former NDTV Ltd chief executive and news anchor Vikram Chandra, Editorji Technologies Pvt in 2018 and it is estimated to be worth $10 million. While revealing the contours of the transaction, RPSG chairman Sanjiv Goenka said his company has acquired a majority stake in the online news site.
“We had been planning on launching our own multimedia news company independently. Yet Editorji had come as a ready-made chance. It is very interesting how it is organized because it is an AI-driven model. It gives clear news without judgment, “he said. Chandra will continue to be managing director and run the company.” We developed the back-end infrastructure, and we needed a scale. We finally found a home in RPSG, “Chandra said in commenting on the transaction. “The primary injection would give us up to two years of runway. We have major plans for advertisers including the introduction of an AI-powered product.
Early investors in Editorji were mint publisher HT Media Ltd and Bharti Airtel Ltd with nearly 5 percent and 8 percent stake in the company respectively. The news playlists curated by Editorji are available to mobile subscribers at Airtel. Goenka has said that people under the age of 35 consume news on smartphones. “I thought that this is something that would be a good fit for this generation. We have plans to expand it significantly, but we think it’s a really good starting point, “he said.
Consumers currently spend an average of 3 hours and 42 minutes per week watching videos online, according to the new survey by the Broadcast Audience Research Council and Nielsen. Goenka said it is keen to turn Editorji into a multilingual product, beginning with Bengali, with the growth in video consumption coming from the regional language market.
“We ‘re going to get into vernacular. We can’t go immediately to every regional market but we’re going to look at India 2, in a manner of speaking. We could start with Kolkata where we have a network of distributions. There are 35 lakh homes and 70 customers of lakh. Even if the app is downloaded by 10 percent, that is 7-8 lakh people, “he added.
Goenka said the issue of monetization of digital properties cannot be resolved in the short term. “Our horizon is not 3 to 6 months. It is a longer-term horizon. We want to scale the subscriber base.”
To publish Fortune in India, the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group has joined up with Fortune Media company. The ABP (Ananda Bazar Patrika) Group previously published Fortune, a business journal, in India.
