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Media technology company Amagi Media Labs has raised $15 million from Premji Invest, the family investment office of Wipro's chairman Azim Premji, and existing investor Mayfield, sources close to the development told TOI.
The company confirmed the investors but declined to comment on the size of the investment. Premji's investment vehicle manages assets worth over $2 billion. Atul Gupta, principal in Premji Invest, has been appointed as an additional director on Amagi's board. Previously, the Bengaluru-based media tech firm had raised Rs 68 crore from Nadathur Holdings and Mayfield.
The fresh funds will be used to expand Amagi's international footprint and its bouquet of regional and national channels in India. The company employs over 110 people and has several deployments in the US, Europe, Africa and Asia. More recently, it has forayed into the Japanese market.
Amagi was started by IIM-Bangalore alumni KA Srinivasan (in pic), Baskar Subramanian and Srividhya Srinivasan in 2008. Prior to Amagi, the trio founded bluetooth audio solutions provider Impulsesoft that was acquired by Nasdaq-listed Sirf Technology.
Amagi buys ad airtime from broadcasters to facilitate geo-targeted advertising and cloud-based content delivery. In other words, Amagi's technology helps to target a TV ad at particular regions (in India, it could be selected states) instead of showing it to the entire audience watching a channel nationally or globally. This reduces costs for advertisers.
Amagi that has over 2,500 clients including Hindustan Unilever, Reckitt & Benckiser, Britannia and Wipro, and it works with some of the leading regional and international TV channels, including Zee, NDTV, Bloomberg, Horse & Country and AMC Networks. "TV is a bundled product.
Newspapers, magazines, radio, billboards and internet have unbundled advertising. So TV is an anomaly in this regard," said Srinivasan. The opportunity is seen to be huge given the regional advertising market for both print and electronic was Rs 6,500 crore last year, a 25%-30% jump over 2013. "We have created the equivalent of local editions on TV," Srinivasan said. Amagi is said to be one of largest TV ad networks with over 30 million ad seconds served across multiple channels in ten countries.
Subramanian said video would be the next frontier of growth. "No big move in video has happened since YouTube. Creating personalized ads present a huge opportunity," he said.
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