Indian Digital Radio Startup Gets Series A Funding From Ojas Ventures

While our country is currently fixated on FM channels, there is definitely a digital revolution in the works in Bangalore. Digital Radio startup, Venturenet Partners Pvt. Ltd. has managed to get Series A funding from Ojas Ventures for their yet to be launched Digital Radio service, Radiowalla.

Venturenet is a young one year old startup which already has one service, called Spot Radio under its belt. Venturenet launched Spot Radio last year in August, 2011 and it has been moving upwards ever since. Right now they have managed to partner with around 20 national retail chains with over 2000 sites in the country. They are expected to be present in 10,000 sites before this year ends. Radiowalla is their direct to consumer approach which will initially offer Internet audio channels for normal netizens. They are expected to launch this in April. The funding amount is as of now, undisclosed.

Venturenet was founded by Anil Srivatsa and Harvinderjit Bhatia. Previously, Anil was the CEO of Kings XI Punjab and COO of Radio Today Broadcasting (Meow 104.8 FM) among other companies.

Ojas Ventures is an Indian VC firm that is focused on early stage funding of Indian technology and Digital Startups. Pavan Krishnamurthy and Raghu Batta from Ojas Ventures will be joining the board of the fledgling startup to steer it in the right direction. They both said in a joint statement, “In Radiowalla founders we saw a set of passionate and experienced entrepreneurs taking an innovative approach to building music based business that addresses a large and growing market opportunity. We’re confident that our operating experience together with working closely with founders will help in creating a valuable company.”

Looking at their website one gets the feeling that they will emulating the Pandora experience for India. Their ‘mood’ based offerings seem somewhat analogous to Pandora’s Music Genome Project. Pandora is not available in India and Radiowalla might just bridge the gap. There is also the slight problem of adoption as broadband speeds are not that good all over India for streaming music and content. If more and more people adopt 3G and if there is better Internet infrastructure in the country in general, the service will succeed nicely. Until then they face some very strong challenges in terms of adoption.

What is your take on Indian Digital Radio channels and services? Do let us know in the comments.