Airtel Acquires Strategic Stake in Juggernaut

New Delhi, December 4, 2017: Bharti Airtel (“Airtel”), India’s largest telecommunications service provider, 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 endeavour 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.

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 fund raise, 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.

Juggernaut’s former investors include Infosys co-founder and current chairman, Nandan Nilekani and Boston Consulting Group India CEO Neeraj Aggarwal. Launched in April 2016, the platform has close to 1 million downloads across android and ioS. In May 2017, the writer’s platform went live to offer amateur writers the ability to digitally publish their content and stand a chance to win publishing contracts. The writer’s platform in the past six months has received just under 500 stories with 9 of them securing publishing contracts.

About Airtel:
Bharti Airtel Limited is a leading global telecommunications company with operations in 17 countries across Asia and Africa. Headquartered in New Delhi, India, the company ranks amongst the top 3 mobile service providers globally in terms of subscribers. In India, the company's product offerings include 2G, 3G and 4G wireless services, mobile commerce, fixed line services, high speed home broadband, DTH, enterprise services including national & international long distance services to carriers. In the rest of the geographies, it offers 2G, 3G, 4G wireless services and mobile commerce. Bharti Airtel had over 383 million customers across its operations at the end of September 2017. To know more please visit, www.airtel.in

About Juggernaut Books:
Focused on the growing smart phone usage in India, Juggernaut aims to give readers and authors both a digital and a traditional publishing platform. By redefining reading and writing for the digital age, it engages both a serious reading audience and a new mobile audience. Its catalogue of 5,000+ books is powered by authors including Twinkle Khanna, Arundhati Roy, William Dalrymple, Rujuta Diwekar, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sagarika Ghose, Sunny Leone and several others. The Juggernaut app is available on both Android and iOS.