How Quintype impacts digital publishing globally
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.”
Technology solutions
Today, most enterprise content creators need to work with a myriad of technology solutions to run a modern digital business. As a result, they have to piece together a customised tech stack to execute everything from content creation to publishing to email marketing. This leads to higher cost of ownership for their publishing platforms and a need to maintain a large in-house tech team.
“Contrary to this, we provide pre-built story templates, a mobile friendly editor, live blogs, omni-channel content delivery, SEO validations, out-of-the-box integrations with Facebook’s instant articles, push notifications and news aggregators,” adds Shetty. “All these services are provided to the clients with a low total cost of ownership. Our billing is based on the bandwidth and average page views of our clients.”
“We now have over 75 publishers on the Quintype platform – TQ, BQ, Vikatan, Prothom Alo, Prabhat Khabar, Swarajya, East mojo, Afaqs, Bar & Bench, etc,” observes Shetty. “Quintype has easy integration of media in content with an option for multiformat content publication. Its SEO-friendly website has easy scope for keyword integration in content. Its customisable frontend suits every publisher’s needs. Quintype’s mobile-friendly and AMP-ready platform gives peace of mind to publishers”.
“We used the headless CMS to launch our digital platform in 2016,” adds Shruty Bhattacharyya, Digital Manager, Ad Sales, Eastmojo. “From CMS to pay-wall solutions, Quintype manages the full tech stack for us. The platform is easy to use and is customised for our requirements.” “It was important to have a CMS that helped us maintain an effective workflow,” says Amarnath Govindarajan, publisher & chief digital officer, Swarajya. “We’ve seen remarkable growth in page views after moving to Bold CMS. The platform comes loaded with content marketing features, which make the entire experience outstanding.”
“We believe that the future of digital publishing will involve stories with richer formats, short summaries, food recipes, video and audio, collections of stories and long reads,” affirms Shetty. “Content will be heavily personalised for the convenience of each and every reader. The general public will be ready to pay and subscribe for the content they consume.” He is looking to expand operations to different regions across the globe. Quintype makes an average in recurring SaaS revenue of over $1million annually. “With our constant efforts to expand our operations across different regions, we look forward to hitting $4 million in two years’ time,” Shetty adds.
Quintype has partners in the EU and Africa and looks forward to many more strategic partnerships with both publishers as well as technology companies to navigate its growth and impact in the digital publishing space, globally.