Airtel acquires strategic stake in Juggernaut Books

India's largest telecom operator Bharti Airtel today said that it has acquired a strategic stake in Juggernaut Books ("Juggernaut"), a popular digital platform to discover and read high quality, affordable books and to submit amateur writing.

The investment is in line with Airtel's endeavor 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 in a statement.

Badal Bagri, Chief Financial Officer, Bharti Airtel said, "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."

Speaking of the fundraising, the founder & publisher, 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 & write and our partnership with Airtel will allow us to expand our distribution manifold", CEO, Simran Khara

Launched in April 2016, the platform has close to a million downloads across Android and iOS smartphones. The writer's platform, launched in May this year, has received about 500 stories with nine of them securing publishing contracts. Its catalog includes authors like Arundhati Roy, Twinkle Khanna, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sunny Leone and others.