By Lancelot Joseph. Executive Editor, Business India

Quintype Technologies, a start-up that provides digital media publishers a secure and robust platform to create, curate, distribute and monetise content, has raised Rs25 crore in Series A. “Media companies and content creators across the world are moving towards a digital-first strategy and the current pandemic situation has only accelerated that shift,” explains Chirdeep Shetty, CEO, Quintype.

“The team at Quintype has been focussed on creating some of the best products for publishers and this will help us provide better support and expand our offerings to publishers globally. We do all the heavy lifting at the technology-end so that publishers can focus on creating the best content for their audience,” adds Shetty.

Digital publishing has seen a fundamental shift in the last few years, with most audiences seeking on-demand content with the proliferation of mobiles. “We are happy to lead this change by creating and expanding this digital ecosystem and this investment by IIFL AMC is a step in that direction,” adds Shetty.  The company intends to use the funds to continue to expand its operations and reach. Leading publishers such as Bloomberg Quint, Prabhat Khabar, Bar & Bench, The Quint and Swarajya use Quintype to publish and distribute all their content.

“Quintype, with its suite of products, is set to accelerate the growth in the digital content and publishing space,” says Prashasta Seth, senior managing partner, IIFL AMC, on the investments it has made. “It enables more content creators to go digital easily and gives them the freedom to distribute, scale up and monetise their content using an intuitive product with hundreds of built-in features. We are happy to partner with the professionally managed Quintype team backed by pedigree promoters, who together make the best combination of both worlds – technology and media – as they embark on a journey to transform the publishing space.”   IIFL AMC is part of IIFL Wealth Management, which got demerged from the IIFL group.  Quintype has been able to raise funds from Quintillion Media and IIFL. Its volume has now expanded to over $8 million.

Quintype was founded in 2016 and has a presence in Delhi and Bengaluru. “We initially developed the software for the digital platforms of The Quint and Bloomberg Quint and then grew into a news-industry software multi-channel solution provider,” explains Shetty. “We are used by over 75 publishers across the world to deliver seamless content experiences for over a billion readers every month.”

With Quintype, publishers can focus on their core competency of producing quality content and leave all the technology-heavy lifting to Quintype’s suite of products. These products help publishers with content management, audience engagement and content monetisation.

Incidentally, scribe Raghav Bahl (founder, CNBC and now Bloomberg Quint) and Ritu Kapoor were instrumental in guiding Quintype with what the media industry requires. Quintype’s first client was The Quint, with Swarajya and BQ coming in later. “We built Quintype from the ground-up, keeping some of these constraints in mind – plugin issues, slow page speeds, discoverability, etc,” discloses Bahl.

“We offer a suite of products that are well-tested to work together. Instead of providing publishers untested plug-ins to choose from for any given function, we only provide options that are guaranteed to work well on the platform. This eliminates the ‘paradox of choice’ issue for publishers. Quintype makes all of these features available in an easy to use cloud-hosted SaaS model, so that publishers do not need to deal with the issues of hosting and scaling systems. We have created products that work well for most publishers.”