Headfone Raises $10 Million In Series B Funding
Funds will be utilized to diversify content offerings across languages and to expand across genres.
By Saptak Bardhan •
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Audio OTT platform, Headfone on Tuesday announced to have raised $10 million in Series B funding led by Elevation Capital. The round also saw participation from Hashed, an existing investor, as well as prominent angels such as Ajit Mohan, Biswa Kalyan Rath and Anshumani Ruddra. Funds will be utilized to diversify content offerings across languages and to expand across genres.
"Unlike video or text, audio enables asynchronous & screen-free content consumption which allows listeners to consume the audio content throughout the day. Also, the popular fiction genres like horror, fantasy and thriller are really expensive to create and difficult to get right in video format whereas the same genres can be quickly produced in audio drama format, and still give an immersive and imaginative experience to listeners," said Pratham Khandelwal, CEO, Headfone.
The rise of OTT in India has been unprecedented. India has become a huge market for the OTT platforms. According to a report by PwC, the OTT market in India is expected to reach INR 11.976 crore by 2023 as compared to INR 4464 crore in 2018.
"What stands out about Pratham and Yogesh is the product-first approach they have taken to generating high quality user generated content. The uniqueness of this approach has resulted in a tremendous amount of customer love for Headfone, which is evidenced by their best in class retention metrics. What is even more impressive is that they have gotten to this stage with a lean, 9-member team that is passionate about creating great audio content," said Mayank Khanduja, partner, Elevation Capital
Founded in 2018 by former Facebook software engineers, Pratham Khandelwal and Yogesh Sharma, Headfone is an audio OTT platform that primarily offers audio dramas in fiction genres like horror, thriller, romance, etc. Headfone onboards creators and provides them with tools to create high quality content. There are currently three million monthly active users on Headfone. There are a total of 800,000 content pieces on the platform, which has been growing at a 10 per cent compound monthly growth rate for the past two years. Headfone has a unique community-driven, collaborative strategy wherein content gets created asynchronously rather than sequentially and currently offers content in Hindi.
