NBCUniversal and Hornbill Capital Lead $80 Million Round in Story TV Owner EloElo
NBCUniversal and Hornbill Capital Lead $80 Million Round in Story TV Owner EloElo
NBCUniversal and Hornbill Capital have co-led an $80 million funding round in EloElo Group, the Bengaluru-based company behind Indian microdrama app Story TV, Variety reported.
Microdramas are short serialised dramas, watched in bite-sized episodes on a phone. Story TV carries more than 5,000 of them in six languages, and adds a new title every three hours. Its users spend 95 minutes a day on the app on average, according to the same report.
The deal is a Series C, meaning a later-stage round of fundraising from outside investors. MIT Investment Co. joined the round alongside existing backers Play Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Waterbridge Ventures and Griffin Gaming Partners. The raise takes EloElo's total funding to $130 million. Avendus Capital acted as sole financial adviser.
In October, Economic Times reported that EloElo was in advanced talks to raise $50-60 million led by Hornbill Capital, at a valuation of around $400 million. That works out to about Rs 480-580 crore. The round that has now been announced is larger, at $80 million.
EloElo was founded in 2020 by chief executive Saurabh Pandey, a former Flipkart executive. The company is not only a microdrama business. It also runs Master, a micro learning app, Voxy AI, an AI companion agent, and Dolphin AI, which it describes as an agentic AI creative suite. Its apps have more than 40 million monthly active users combined and have passed 300 million installs.
The company says the new money will go towards three things: original programming in local languages, an overseas launch for its microdramas, and further development of Dolphin AI. Deepak Arya, NBCUniversal's executive vice president of corporate strategy and development, is the executive named on the NBCUniversal side of the deal.
Hornbill Capital was set up in 2014 by Manoj Thakur. Its role as co-lead puts it at the centre of a round that now spans a global media company and a set of Indian investors.
For the people behind the scenes, a funding round like this one means more than headlines. Local-language originals need writers, actors, directors and editors, and the new money is meant to pay for them. Whether the overseas launch and the new shows arrive on the schedule the company has in mind is something the company has yet to say.
