YourStory Media Pvt Ltd, the privately held Bengaluru-based company behind showcasing Indian startups through YourStory.com, has raised an undisclosed amount of investment from Ratan Tata, former Infosys board member T V Mohandas Pai, Vani Kola managing director of Kalaari Capital and Karthee Madasamy, managing director of Qualcomm Ventures India.

The funding announcement was made by Shradha Sharma, founder and chief editor of YourStory, in a blog post. As Shradha Sharma mentions they have bootstrapped untill now and this is their first round of funding.

YourStory raises under $5M from Kalaari, Ratan Tata & others

Shradha, who launched YourStory.com in October 2008, began her career as a brand advisor with The Times of India, India’s largest-selling English newspaper, and was later an assistant vice president with business news channel CNBC TV18.

Shradha later told VCCircle that the investment is between $3 million and $5 million (Rs 20-32.5 crore) but did not disclose the exact amount. Vani Kola, co-founder and managing director of Kalaari Capital, has joined the board of YourStory following the investment. This is the first external funding for the digital media company.

YourStory primarily generatesrevenues from advertisements on site besides the events it hosts. It has about 50 employees of which 18 are in editorial, according to an employee who did not want to be named.

YourStory Secures Funding to Launch a Tech Product

The company is launching a tech product which will help people to write, talk and view their own stories in native Indian languages. Even as the flagship English platform YourStory.com continues to grow rapidly, YourStory’s team will create original content in Indian languages starting with Hindi, Telugu, Bangla, Kannada, Tamil and Marathi.

“We believe we are in the ‘transformative’ business, one story at a time. This power of transformation should be available not only to English language users but also to the millions of Indians who are coming online and are eager to communicate in their own language.

By democratising the means of storytelling, we wish to revolutionise storytelling itself. We want to become the number one destination for everyone to write, share and read stories”, said Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory.