CitJo a Media-Tech startup raises undisclosed amount from RiiDL
CitJo is a MediaTech startup, building India’s first easy-to-use hyperlocal news video-sharing platform, which will empower digital and citizen journalism in India, and provides the user with the latest and most important local news updates in real-time.
Founded by a 20-year-old Shubham Chaubey who hails from Barauli, a small town in the Gopalganj district of Bihar, completed his secondary schooling in Gopalganj and moved to Mumbai 5 years ago to pursue his higher studies in journalism.
The CitJo is currently incubated at Research Innovation Incubation Design Laboratories also known as RiiDL and the company has raised an undisclosed amount from Riidl last month in the pre-seed round.
Despite having 1,18,000+ registered publications in the country, there’s a dearth of regional content available on the internet. CitJo’s main motive is to provide ‘real-time local news updates’ through the app to the people residing in rural areas in their own regional languages. Most of the important news and events happening in India do not find their way to the mainstream media because these events happen in rural areas. However, the main objective of this app(CitJO) is to help bring out this local and rural news in the form of videos made by the local journalists of that locality to each and every corner of the nation.
“Journalism is a noble profession but with the inclusion of profits, TRPs, commercialization, this profession is corrupted and I want to try and solve this problem from its roots. Journalists, Reporters, and News Anchors, want to cover real news in its truest forms, moreover, there are citizens who want to know this news and CitJo will act as a bridge between them.” – Says the founder.
According to bestmediainfo.com, Indian language internet users are expected to grow at a CAGR of 18 percent to reach 536 million by the end of 2022, while English users are expected to grow by only 3 percent reaching 199 million within the same period. Adding to this, according to the google-KPMG report, 2019, there would be over 1 billion Indian users connected to digital platforms by the year 2030.
And CitJo aims to serve this estimated number of users by digitizing and partnering with offline local news publishers and other vernacular language reporters across the nation.
When asked about struggle & challenges in his entrepreneurial journey, Chaubey, the founder of CitJo, said “To be very honest the thought of giving up hasn’t really crossed my mind. Obviously, there were a lot of hurdles I had to overcome but I believe it is a part of the entrepreneurship journey. The times when I had conversations with my father about my financial crunches and he did not hesitate to give me his money just because he saw me working really hard and he believed in my vision. Even though I come from a very humble background the fact that my family did not hesitate to support me in my venture. It’s my family and my friends who really keep me going. I mean after everything is said and done, I believe that people is all that we have got and people is all that we need.”
