Pressmart announces six million dollars funding from 2 VC firms

Hyderabad, Sep 4 (UNI) Pressmart Media Ltd, a leading print-to- digital delivery service, today said it has secured a six million dollar funding from two VC firms from the Bay area -- Draper Fisher Jurvetson and NEA Indo-US Ventures - as it moves into its next phase of growth, including mobile newspaper.

The investment will accelerate Pressmart's global footprint and the resources to build on its market momentum, expanding its global sales, marketing and customer-support presence across 35 countries, where it currently serves over 350 print media customers.

Pressmart's strong Saas-based ePublishing and Digitisation services have helped the company gain recognition worldwide, coupled with a unique 360-degree service that offers ePublishing, delivery, hosting, subscription management, online payment, ad-serving and user intelligence, all through one package.

Making the announcement here, Pressmart CEO Sanjiv Gupta said each of the VCs have contributed USD three million each. The company, a new media delivery partner of leading newspapers and magazines in over 15 languages across 350 countries, had till now ''only offered familiarisation data'' to them by picking up one million dollar revenue last year.

With the new push, the company will open its offices in the US, UK, Singapore and Dubai and the beefed up marketing initiative was likely to yield Rs 100 crore business over the next three years from 5,000 publications. Three European gadget manufacturers were testing the 'beta' version of Pressmart's format for launching mobile newspaper.''The launch is likely to be announced soon'', Mr Gupta added.

''The adoption rate of our print-to-digital service has been remarkable over the past 24 months. Apart from leading international publishing houses, we are vendors to some of the most respected Global associations like the WAN, SNA, NNA, among others. The investment from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and NEA IndoUS Ventures, along with their combined energy and experience will help Pressmart amplify its global leadership position in authenticated, published, structured, audit-trail able and aggregated content, distributed over new media channels rapidly''.

According to the industry estimates, the worldwide print readership was in excess of 1.4 billion readers daily and the worldwide publications was in excess of 1.62 million. In India alone there were about 1,50,000 publications registered with RNI.

Pressmart also announced the induction of two highly accomplished professionals, Sateesh Andra, Venture Partner of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Vinod Dham, Founding Managing director of NEA-IndoUS Ventures to strengthen its Board of Directors.

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