A FinTech based start-up, ConsCent gets added to SucSEED portfolio!
ConsCent, the start-up that provides monetisation diversification technology to power reader revenue funnels for news, OTT, and other content platforms. It provides various behavior analytics, key metrics to customers and offers monetization opportunities through various marketing and recommendation tools.
ConsCent has raised a total of Rs 13.26 crore in a bridge round. The round was led by Inflection Point Ventures. The round also witnessed the participation of early-stage funds like SucSEED Indovation Fund, Varanium Capital, RiSo Capital, Sigurd Ventures, Startup Angels Network, AngelList, PitchRight Ventures, and angels like Quess Corp’s Vijay Sivaram, Droom’s Sandeep Aggarwal, former Rivigo Co-founder Gazal Kalra, among others.
ConsCent is also backed by AngelList, WhiteBoard Capital, PitchRight Ventures, Adept Ventures and Founders of Indiamart, Ixigo; and angels like Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Innov8’s Ritesh Malik, Droom’s Sandeep Agarwal, BharatPe’s Suhail Sameer, and Mamaearth’s Varun Alagh, alongside others who continue to support the idea and commit to empowering the content ecosystem in India.
With this round of funding, ConsCent plans to use the fund for hiring technology talents, expanding sales and marketing team and investment in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools for developing in-house technology for content monetisation.
When ConsCent started commercial operation in April 2021, there was hardly any content behind paywall, but now large media houses are putting 1 per cent of their content behind paywall.
With ConsCent’s unique feature, users can take an economical approach and pay for the limited amount of content which they specifically want to consume rather than buy the platform subscription. It offers an end to end solution in a single system to help content companies to engage, retain and transact with users with the help of a closed loop approach to increase reach and conversion of both active and paid users. The content companies have witnessed a multifold increase in revenue from users once they start using ConsCent’s platform. The media houses have to look at this source of revenue as they compete with digital marketing platforms like Google and Facebook for advertising revenues.
ConsCent is founded by Sunny Sen and Sounak Mitra. Sunny comes with 14+ years of experience in journalism. Ex-Times, Financial Express, Hindustan Times, India Today, ABP, Network18. He has headed the financial newsroom at Financial Express and has strong connections in the industry. Sounak comes with 17+ years of experience in journalism. Ex- ABP, Mint, Telegraph, Financial Times, Network18, Business Standard. He has been recognised for his outstanding work for many years.
“We are excited about ConsCent’s future, and welcome our new investors. The financing is a validation of ConsCent’s vision to create great monetisation opportunities for media and content companies and democratise the consumption of premium content through easy one-click payments, better recommendations, and intelligent engagement. We see this as a multi-billion opportunity as we pioneer the concept of pay-per-use to subscription, coupled with ML-driven recommendations, and intelligent paywalls and engagement,” said Sunny Sen, CEO and Co-founder of ConsCent.
He further added, “ConsCent will primarily use the new funding to expand the product. “We will expand our technology team and launch over 15 new products and features over the next 12 months, in the areas of payments, engagement and retention, and design. We are also developing an entirely new AI/ML-based personalisation engine to ensure the highest level of content affinity for each content consumer.”
“With this funding, ConsCent will be able to achieve faster speed-to-market as we expand our technology and sales teams. ConsCent will use the funding to build futuristic tech solutions that will help media companies understand the digital consumer, engage with them in the best way possible while creating technology solutions that will allow media companies to introduce the world’s first intelligent paywall, based on user behaviour understanding of who will pay how much, and for what kind of content, whether it is through pay-per-use or subscriptions,” said Sounak Mitra, Founder and COO of ConsCent.
Speaking on investing in ConsCent, Vikrant Varshney, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of SucSEED Indovation Fund said, “According to FICCI-EY’s report, Digital subscription and paywalls are rapidly emerging as the primary revenue driver for many media businesses and revenue in India is projected to grow at 25% CAGR as paid subscriptions are expected to double to over 100 million by 2023. ConsCent is designed to build a single platform for users to access all content through one wallet rather than going to multiple sites for consumption and paying the full subscription amount.”
Mitesh Shah, Co-founder, Inflection Point Ventures, said, “Content in the form of news is a powerful consumption tool. Increasingly, serious readers are preferring to move to a subscription-led model because amidst the noise it is challenging and time consuming to get meaningful content. ConsCent’s pioneering approach of pay per use subscription model promises to provide premium content and also enables like-minded people to connect, strengthen their partnership and monetise their service. We believe this amalgamation of content and fintech has the potential to disrupt traditional content as we know it.”
Aparajit Bhandarkar, Partner at Varanium Capital, said, “Global trends in digital content consumption are rapidly changing. ConsCent’s solution provides data-driven personalised recommendations and monetisation using micro payments and subscriptions. ConsCent empowers publishers to better manage their content lifecycle. We are excited to join them in this growth journey.”
About SucSEED Indovation Fund — SucSEED Indovation Fund (SIF) is an AIF Cat-1 Venture Capital Angel Fund with a ₹100 crore corpus and has grown out of SucSEED Angel Network (SAN) and IIITH Tech Ventures, an early-stage tech seed initiative with IIIT Hyderabad Foundation. General Partners of the Indovation Fund have 100+ years of cumulative experience within technology, fund management, and start-up ecosystem and have already invested in 60+ startups. SIF attempts to support Indian Innovation for mass needs in the following Six (6) sectors — EdTech, FinTech, Health-tech, Security & RegTech, Enterprise & MSME SaAS, and Digital Economy & Emerging Tech.