Viridian Capital backs e-book publisher Matrubharti

Digital publisher Matrubharti, run by Ahmedabad-based Matrubharti Technologies Pvt. Ltd, has raised Rs 20 lakh (around $30,000) in seed funding from Viridian Capital.

The funding will be used to upgrade the technology and expand its team, according to a company statement.

Matrubharti is a self-publishing platform which publishes stories, novels, articles, biographies, poems and essays in e-book form in six Indian languages. It has an app through which customers can download the e-books. Matrubharti plans to take this up to 21 regional languages. It uses patent-pending low-cost technology for producing these digital rights protected e-books.

Matrubharti was incubated at the Espark-Viridian Accelerator Centre at GIFT City (Gujarat International Finance Tec-City).

Matrubharti claims to have 1,800 authors registered on its site, publishing 4,350 e-books so far. It claims to be publishing over 450 e-books every month and says that 7.5 lakh e-books have been downloaded so far.

"Investment by Viridian Capital in our firm is a testimony that we have a business model which is likely to grow at a healthy rate. Matrubharti offers a digital platform to new and aspiring writers, which is our unique selling proposition among digital publishers," said Mahendra Sharma, co-founder, Matrubharti.

A recent survey by market research agency Nielsen revealed that India's book publishing market is currently the sixth largest in the world at Rs 26,100 crore, and is likely to touch Rs 73,900 crore by 2020.

Matrubharti competes with Chennai- and US-based Magzter Inc., which runs digital magazine store Magzter.com.

Viridian Capital is an arm of Viridian Group and focuses on the private equity real estate space. The Group has expertise in fund management, real estate development, financial services and venture capital segments. Group company Viridian Ventures provides entrepreneurship development services such as incubation, acceleration, mentorship, infrastructure support, catalysing capital, investor relations, exit support and others.

In June 2015, Viridian Group had tied up with Scotland's Entrepreneurial Spark to launch an accelerator programme for emerging startups in India.

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