India’s EloElo nabs $80M from NBCUniversal to bet on the country’s rising microdrama market

More than 118 million users watch microdramas every month as the serialized format has taken off in India. EloElo’s Story TV is one of the top apps for microdramas, with over 33 million active users, according to analysts.

Banking on that scale, the company has raised $80 million in Series C from Hornbill Capital and NBCUniversal. This round brings its total fundraising to $130 million, with a valuation of $500 million.

As people spend more time on platforms hosting verticalized videos, serialized content has become popular in multiple geographies, including the U.S., China, and India, with Hollywood celebrities like Issa Rae, James Franco, and Kim Kardashian investing in and starring in the format.

Given India’s massive internet population of more than a billion and the country’s appetite for entertainment content, it presents a big market opportunity, with analysts expecting the industry to cross $3-$4 billion in annual revenue by 2030. Last year, dedicated apps like Story TV, Kuku TV, and Quick TV were among the top downloaded video streaming apps in the country.

Founded in 2020 by former Flipkart exec Saurabh Pandey, the Story TV platform has taken off in the last few years with a catalog of over 5,000 titles in six languages. Pandey told TechCrunch that because of the snackable content format, users log 95 minutes on the app on average through multiple sessions in a day.

“I fundamentally believe that the next billion users will probably not grow up on a diet of watching television; they will grow up on a diet of watching content on their phones, right? And this content has to be, and this entertainment, designed very differently. It’s not going to be appointment viewing. It’s going to be within certain slots throughout the day. And a lot of this was earlier solved for short clips, but serialized storytelling was never solved,” Pandey said about the microdrama format.

He believes that there still will be a place for big-screen viewing with family or friends, but the majority of entertainment consumption would be done through mobile.

All microdrama platforms compete against platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, where creators are posting content for free. Some of them are also creating a way for creators to post serialized content. Pandey thinks that producing quality content on the platform will entice users to choose StoryTV over other free platforms. The company points to its partnerships, such as the one with Indian TV production company Balaji Telefilms, to produce content.

The company offers different kinds of subscriptions ranging from monthly, quarterly, and yearly to unlock content. It also offers some free content supported by ads, which might not be as lucrative a medium to make money as subscriptions, according to reports.

Monetization is a challenge in India, as users often stick around for free content, but few convert to paid users. A report from analyst firm Redseer indicates that more than 40 million people have paid for microdrama at least once, but only 15-17 million users pay for it on a monthly basis. A separate survey by Ormax Media suggested that 72% of people haven’t ever paid while consuming microdrama.

AI and other bets

All microdrama platforms want to have enough supply to engage different audiences and want to involve AI to solve that. Some platforms, like Google-backed Kuku, want to improve workflows and create more content, and some platforms like Dashverse’s Shortfree want to use video AI models to create serialized clips.

At the moment, StoryTV falls into the first camp with its Dolphin AI platform. Started as an internal tool to improve video creation, the company is now planning to make the tool widely available. It can act as an editor with templates and an array of models to create images, audio, and video, according to its website.

EloElo’s vision is to have people use this tool for marketing campaigns and ads as well. Notably, while Indian platforms like Pocket and Kuku have built AI tools and given them to creators, it is likely to accelerate their content pipeline. But at InVideo, there hasn’t been a scaled effort to provide a good alternative to CapCut or Instagram Edits to creators from India.

Pandey believes that human involvement is still paramount to producing good stories, and AI tools are still creative directors for steering.

“My belief in involving AI is that AI is a really fast race car where AI is the engine, but you need an extremely capable Formula One driver to be on the steering wheel. That, for me, is the creative director or the showrunner. AI is supposed to work with them, augmenting their skill set. AI can help write stories, but so far the best stories I have loved have all had a very high human x AI element to it,” he said.

Besides microdrama, the company also has a vertical video learning app, Master, competing with the likes of Seekho and Kuku’s Guru, and an AI companion app, Voxy AI. The company said that it has more than 40 million monthly users across its apps. While it didn’t bifurcate users by app, the majority of users belong to Story TV.

EloElo currently has 240 people and wants to hire to increase the size of its AI and machine learning research team. The company is also deploying a good chunk of its capital to produce more original titles.

MIT Investment Co., along with existing investors like Play Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Waterbridge Ventures, and Griffin Gaming Partners, invested in the round.

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