News portal The Ken raises second round of angel funding

The Ken, a subscription-based news startup, has raised around $228,000 (Rs 1.48 crore) from a group of individual investors in its second round of funding, documents filed with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) show.

The investors who participated in the round include Siddharth Bhammar, executive director of investment bank JP Morgan; Anchal Jain, former executive at JP Morgan; and Murali Abburi, managing director of Graticule Asset Management Asia and also a former JP Morgan executive.

The Ken’s co-founder Ashish K Mishra declined to comment on the development, which was first reported by data platform paper.vc.

The Ken, run by Bengaluru-based Kenrise Media Pvt Ltd, had last February raised $400,000 (Rs 2.68 crore then) from a clutch of investors including digital wallet Paytm’s chief executive officer Vijay Shekhar Sharma.

The company’s founding team includes journalists Seema Singh and Mishra as well as serial entrepreneurs Sumanth Raghavendra and Rohin Dharmakumar.

The Ken’s existing investors include entrepreneurs such as Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder, TaxiForSure; Deepak Natraj, managing director, Aarin Capital; Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshdesk; Pallav Nadhani, co-founder and CEO of FusionCharts; Pavan Ongole, former director of Japan’s SoftBank; and Sandeep Mathur, managing director, Graticule Asset Management.

Shan Krishnasamy, co-founder and CTO of Freshdesk; Shanmugam Nagarajan, co-founder and chief product officer, [24]7; and V Balakrishnan, chairman of Exfinity Ventures and former chief financial officer and board member at Infosys, have also invested.

Mahesh Murthy, the co-founder of early-stage investment firm Seedfund, had also invested in The Ken before exiting three months later. 

The Ken offers reportage across technology, startups, business, science and healthcare. It competes with a few products of The VCCircle Network.

The parent of VCCircle Network, whose businesses include subscription data products, events, training programmes and a subscription-led news website, was acquired by News Corp in March 2015.

In February this year, Kochi-based Quadzeta Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which operates inFact, a mobile app which aggregates news and infotainment content, raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from Joel George, a Saudi Arabia-based angel investor. 

Last December, news curation app Inshorts had raised $5 million (Rs 32.2 crore) from existing investor Tiger Global in a bridge round of funding.