Airtel acquires strategic stake in Juggernaut Books

Key Highlights

• Airtel hopes the acquisition would ramp up content acquisition on Juggernaut Books.
• Shares of Airtel were up 1.49%  on BSE Sensex intraday.
• Juggernaut’s former investors include Infosys co-founder and current chairman, Nandan Nilekani. 

Bharti Airtel on Monday announced that it has acquired a strategic stake in Juggernaut Books, a digital platform to discover and read high quality, affordable books and to submit amateur writing.

“Juggernaut is an exciting digital platform and complements our content vision. We look forward to working with them and supporting the next phase of their growth journey,” Badal Bagri, Chief Financial Officer, Bharti Airtel said. 

The telecom operator said its investment in Juggernaut Books would ramp up content acquisition in the company.

“The investment is in line with Airtel’s endeavour to build an open content ecosystem and bring world-class digital content to its customers. The investment from Airtel will enable Juggernaut to ramp up content acquisition, digital marketing and prepare for a subscription offering launch in the next few months,” Airtel said.

Shares of the telecom operator were up 1.49% or 7.20 points on BSE Sensex at 1239 hours at Rs 490.45 apiece.

Speaking of the fund raise, the founder and publisher Juggernaut Books, Chiki Sarkar said, “We are excited to partner with Airtel in our journey ahead. Airtel has a great understanding of digital content consumption and we have much to learn and benefit from this strategic partnership”.

“Our ambition is to get many more Indians to read and write and our partnership with Airtel will allow us to expand our distribution manifold,” CEO, Simran Khara said.

Juggernaut’s former investors include Infosys co-founder and current chairman, Nandan Nilekani and Boston Consulting Group India CEO Neeraj Aggarwal.

Juggernaut Books was launched in April 2016, and claimed to have close to 1 million downloads across android and ioS. 

In May 2017, the writer’s platform went live to offer amateur writers the ability to digitally publish their content and stand a chance to win publishing contracts. 

The writer’s platform received under 500 stories with nine of them securing publishing contracts in the past six months.