Gaana, a leading digital music service in India, is raising $115 million in new round of funding from Chinese internet giant Tencent, with participation from its seed investor Times Internet.

Tencent is the majority shareholder of Tencent Music Entertainment, China’s largest music
streaming business. It also operates Joox, a leading music streaming platform in Southeast Asia.

Gaana intends to use the capital to further invest into technology to use AI to personalize
music experiences for each consumer, to further develop its subscription product for paying
users, and to develop aligned music experiences for Gaana consumers.

Gaana claims to have crossed 60 million monthly active users in December last year.

Gaana was incubated seven years ago by Times Internet. Over the last four years, its mobile app grew 700 per cent in consumption. Eighty-eight per cent of Gaana’s monthly users come from India.

Prashan Agarwal, CEO Gaana, said: “Music streaming is the future of music consumption
globally, and in India, we’re only 10 per cent of the way towards building a business useful for 500 million Indians. Tencent will be a great partner to help us enable India to access and enjoy unlimited music at their fingertips.”

“Gaana is a leading music streaming platform in India, where millions of users stay tuned to its rich music library including its exclusive Bollywood content,” said Martin Lau, President of Tencent Holdings.

“As more affordable mobile data plans are driving smartphone penetration in India, we believe growth in the music streaming market will accelerate. By investing in and collaborating with Gaana, we look forward to bringing more innovation and better experiences to all Indian music lovers.”

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Noida-based video analytics platform Vidooly has raised US$1.4 million in Series A round of funding from GVFL and Times Group’s digital arm Times Internet Limited (TIL)

Vidooly will utilise the funds for product engineering, marketing, and enhancing sales and distribution channels.

“Video consumption over the last couple of years has exploded, given faster and affordable internet access and also the rising demand for devices and high quality online content. We plan to utilise the funds to expand in attractive markets such as the US, Europe and Asia and also strengthen the team at Vidooly. With the rise of video platforms, the demand for video intelligence has grown multifold and we aim to be a dominant player in this space globally,” said Co-founder Nishant Radia.

Launched in November 2014 by Subrat Kar, Ajay Mishra and Radia, Vidooly is an online video intelligence platform that allows content creators, brands, multi-channel networks, agencies and media companies to drive more engagement to their videos.

Its audience and content insights empower video teams to optimise their media buy at scale, refine their content, distribution and optimisation strategy, find and partner with influencers as well.

According to the firm, over 20,000 video content creators across the globe have signed up on its platform to grow across social video such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Everyday, Vidooly’s Big Data engine analyses the engagement of over 500 million viewers and tracks 250 million videos across five platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vine, and Instagram.

Currently, its video intelligence software empowers some of the big names in the industry such as Fine Brothers, TVF, OML, VideoGyan, GroupM, Mindshare, Thoughtful Media, WebTV Asia etc.

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