Mumbai: The founders Ajay Chacko, B Saikumar and Sanjay Ray Chaudhuri along with the Enam Group have acquired the residual stake held in the company by Unilazer Ventures and Ronnie Screwvala. With this Entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala has exited from Arre, a venture he cofounded with former Network18 executives. The Enam Group has acquired a significant minority stake in Arre (www.arre.co.in).
The Arre investment would be Enam’s first significant investment in the private equity domain in the media sector. Arre is a multi-media, multi-genre digital media brand offering original content across video, audio, text and doodles, across various genres such as fiction, factual entertainment, documentaries, social experiments and more.
This is the second shareholding restructuring of Arre in about two months. In February, Saikumar had taken controlling stake while Sanjay Ray Chaudhuri had come in as a cofounder in the company that was formed in January 2015.
Enam’s investments will be used in the organic build out of Arre’s content, the overall product offering and facilitate scaling into a significant player in the digital content business. The Enam group has been an early investor in several sectors including the media sector. Their past investments in the media space include Zee TV, TV18 and Balaji Telefilms.
Arre’s debut web series, A.I.SHA | My Virtual Girlfriend, has already crossed more than a million video views. IDWT (I Don’t Watch TV), a disruptive spoof on the TV industry was launched a few days back and Arre’s immediately upcoming products are a first-of-its kind audio series titled Trial by Error | The Aarushi Files, in an exclusive association with Saavn as well as Death By Breath, its first documentary produced in collaboration with The Indian Express Group. Branded content, video and display advertising, syndication and multi-platform content alliances lead Arre’s revenue model.
Digital content consumption and advertising, especially video advertising, has been witnessing a stupendous growth curve. Better broadband speeds synchronous with the roll-out of 4G, along with the mushrooming of digital payments could also throw open the possibility of consumer pay revenues in this space.
Founder and Managing Director, Arre, B Saikumar, said: “I am delighted to have the Enam Group on board. Arre and Enam have a unified vision of making Arre the definitive multi-genre, multi-format digital destination for a whole new world of digital consumers pan-India and going forward in geographies outside India.”
