We’re excited to share that our portfolio company, Eloelo, has raised $80 million in a Series C round led by Hornbill Capital and NBCUniversal, with participation from MIT Investment Management Co. and existing investors, including Waterbridge Ventures, Play Ventures, Griffin Gaming Partners and Kalaari Capital.  

With this round, Eloelo's total funding raised to date stands at $130 million.

Eloelo is building a new-age entertainment ecosystem for Bharat, bringing together micro-dramas through StoryTV, bite-sized learning through Master, and AI-native products through Voxy AI and Dolphin AI. Each product reflects the team's deep understanding of India's evolving consumer preferences and its ability to turn emerging content formats into scalable entertainment businesses.

At the heart of Eloelo's journey is a simple insight: entertainment is most powerful when it creates a connection with its audience. By combining culturally relevant content with accessible formats and relatable user experiences, the company is building products that go beyond passive consumption to create habits and lasting engagement.

We congratulate Saurabh Pandey and the entire Eloelo team on this remarkable milestone.

Kalaari has been part of Eloelo’s journey since leading its Series A round in 2022. What stood out was Saurabh’s deep understanding of consumer behaviour and his ability to identify emerging opportunities in India’s digital ecosystem. Kalaari saw an opportunity at the intersection of social gaming, interactive entertainment, and the creator economy.

The idea for Eloelo emerged from a personal experience. While helping his mother, a yoga instructor, expand her reach, Saurabh recognized the challenges that creators faced in building audiences and monetizing their expertise. This led to a larger realization that India had a growing pool of talented individuals who could create value and build communities but lacked accessible platforms to reach audiences and earn from their content.  

Eloelo set out to bridge this gap through interactive, culturally relevant entertainment. Over the years, we have had the privilege of working closely with the team as they navigated multiple phases of the company's evolution. From building a livestreaming platform to creating a multi-product entertainment ecosystem, they have consistently demonstrated the ability to recognise emerging consumer trends, challenge established formats and translate those insights into entirely new product categories.

Progress Since Our Investment in 2022

India's entertainment landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift. Increasing digital consumption and the growing appetite for regional and culturally relevant content are creating opportunities for new formats to emerge.

As audiences move beyond traditional television and conventional content formats, there is room for platforms that combine compelling storytelling with accessible, personalised experiences.

Eloelo has capitalised on these shifts by building a portfolio of entertainment products, each addressing a distinct consumer need. Today, the group reaches over 40 million monthly active users across its platforms, with StoryTV recording 95 minutes of daily engagement.

From a Single Platform to a Suite of Entertainment Products

Eloelo has expanded into vertical micro-dramas through StoryTV, which has emerged as a key growth engine with its short-form storytelling, and micro-learning through Master, which brings bite-sized learning experiences to users. Alongside these, the group is developing AI-native products through Voxy AI and Dolphin AI.

This multi-product strategy allows the group to serve different consumer needs while building on its core strengths in content, technology and consumer insights. Eloelo is demonstrating the potential of mobile-first entertainment products built for India's next billion users.

A Content Engine Built for Continuous Innovation

Beyond its consumer-facing products, Eloelo has invested in building the capabilities to create and scale content efficiently. The team launches five to six new shows every day, supported by an in-house AI-powered content creation tool.

The combination of owned intellectual property, rapid content production and deep consumer insights gives Eloelo the ability to continually experiment with formats, discover what resonates with users and scale successful experiences.

The Roadmap Ahead: Building the Future of Entertainment with AI

As Eloelo continues to expand its entertainment portfolio, its next opportunity lies at the intersection of content, technology and artificial intelligence.

One example is Dolphin AI, which began as an internal tool to accelerate Eloelo's own content production and has since evolved into an agentic AI studio for end-to-end video creation.

Dolphin goes beyond generating individual video clips. It addresses some of the more complex challenges in AI-powered video production, including multiple shots, character consistency, visual continuity and coherent storytelling. By making these capabilities accessible through simple prompts, the platform aims to bring sophisticated video creation tools to a much broader audience.

This is a natural extension of what Eloelo has been building: a deep understanding of content, the technology to produce it at scale and the ability to bring engaging experiences to millions of consumers. With AI, the opportunity extends beyond making content creation faster. It could fundamentally change who gets to tell stories, how many stories can be created and how content from markets like India reaches audiences around the world.

India's scale, linguistic diversity and rich storytelling traditions create a compelling opportunity for AI-native content creation platforms. Dolphin AI is an early example of how technology developed to solve an internal business challenge can evolve into a product with a much broader market opportunity.

As Eloelo continues to invest in its core entertainment businesses while building new AI-native products, the group is working towards its larger ambition of creating a mobile entertainment ecosystem for the next billion users and an AI-native entertainment ecosystem from India for the world.

We are excited to continue partnering with Saurabh and the Eloelo team as they build the next generation of entertainment products from India.

Vani Kola, Managing Director at Kalaari Capital, said:

"Since our first investment in Eloelo, we have been continually impressed by Saurabh and the team's ability to reinvent themselves and anticipate where consumer behaviour is headed. The company has evolved into a portfolio of entertainment businesses with significant scale and strong consumer engagement.

What stands out is not just the scale they have built, but the speed at which they innovate and the ambition to keep pushing boundaries. We believe the intersection of entertainment and AI presents a significant opportunity, especially in a market as large and diverse as India. Congratulations to Saurabh and the entire team on this milestone. We look forward to supporting them as they continue to build for the future."

Kalaari Capital is an early-stage, technology-focused venture capital firm based out of Bengaluru, India. Since 2006, Kalaari has empowered visionary entrepreneurs building unique solutions that reshape the way Indians live, work, consume and transact. The firm’s ethos is to partner early with founders and work with them to navigate the inevitable challenges of fostering ideas into successful businesses. At its core, Kalaari believes in building long-term relationships based on trust, transparency, authenticity, and respect.

If you are an entrepreneur (or know an entrepreneur) building a company in the gaming space, write to us at investments@kalaari.com

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