Vygr’s News Platforms cross half million users, looks at Pre-Series raise early 2024

Indian News Platform Vygr that saw its launch mid 2022 is successfully looking at the next step in its journey as it crosses half a million users across its platforms. Vygr News is a division of the Vygr Media group founded by first generation entrepreneur Sonam Bhagat.

Vygr (pronounced as Vigour which stands for the English word meaning Zest for Life and Enthusiasm) was incorporated in August 2022 with a vision to create India’s Informational Big tech platform. With a proprietary content management system that enables the creation, curation and dissemination of News and informational content across 9 platforms simultaneously, Vygr effectively utilises Tech to supercharge human talent.

Vygr currently generates all of its content in-house across 6 different languages – English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. The house has 4 content formats live across its platforms primarily its website and app (Live on both iOS and Android) – Video, Text, Images and Audio. The content team is headed by senior Media industry professional and 2 times Cannes winner Abhishake Das.

The business is revenue generating and hit breakeven in October 2023 making it one of the few self-sustaining media outlets in the country with a vintage of a little over a year.

Vygr has its own App & Website that serves News in 23 categories (PC: Vygr)

The Founder-CEO Ms. Sonam Bhagat commented, “Vygr has the potential to become India’s big tech and perhaps our contribution to the world in terms of the apt format of information dissemination. India has a population of 135 crore people of which 40% are youth that crave for actionable insights, not just information but information that they can use. Vygr has been created to serve information that is use-worthy and not just newsworthy from across the nation. Raising funds for us to strengthen the AI capabilities of our systems and the capacities of our servers to take in a large number of users is now imperative. But the investors coming in now participate in revenues since we have stress-tested our revenue models for over a year and are now equipped to run an unbiased two-dimensional information ecosystem that can sustain itself.”

Vygr serves News in 6 languages enabling Users to share own content (PC: Vygr)

Abhishake added, “Vygr’s USP is its pro-sumer model of information where content is created both in-house by Vygr’s journalists as well as the users who can contribute their own news pieces in the same four formats- Text articles, Videos, audio podcasts and pictures.”

The Business and Revenue Team for Vygr is led by Prashant Pandey who comes from over a decade of experience in Sales stated, “The website sees over 3.5 lac users every month and the app has already crossed 10000 downloads without much marketing push. As we cross 1 lac users on the app, avenues like app ads and user micro purchases open up for us. We are yet to unlock our biggest potential stream of revenue as our average app usage time has high chances of being over 10 minutes per day – The app is gamified to keep users hooked on and the tiering levels give them a sense of upgradation as loyal users as they go higher up the value chain.”

The Pre-Series for Vygr is expected to be a combination of debt and equity as the company intends to cross a user level milestone before they raise a major round. The cap table currently consists of the promoter family and early-joiner employees. Vygr aims to utilise the funds for Tech and AI upgrades as well as manpower and user acquisition.