A Netflix for the village – India’s start-ups go rural
The tiny villages of Haryana state in India’s rural north-west find themselves in an unlikely spotlight these days.
Farmers’ homes in hamlets around the industrial town of Rohtak are suddenly in demand, doubling up as movie sets.
Alongside the mooing of cows, it isn’t unusual to hear a director shouting “lights, camera, action” here.
A new start-up, called STAGE, has spawned a nascent film industry in this hinterland.
“Batta”, a high-octane drama about power and injustice, is just the latest in half-a-dozen movies under production in the area, Vinay Singhal, founder of STAGE, told the BBC on the film’s sets.
“There were just a dozen odd Haryanvi films made in India’s history before we came in. Since 2019, we’ve made more than 200,” says Mr Singhal.
STAGE makes content for largely under-served provincial audiences, keeping hyper-local tastes, dialectical quirks and the rural cultural syntax in mind.
There are 19,500 different dialects in India, and STAGE has identified 18 that are spoken by a large enough population to merit their own film industry.
The app currently offers content in two languages – Rajasthani and Haryanvi. It has three million paying subscribers and is planning to expand and include other dialects like Maithili and Konkani, which are spoken in north-east and coastal-west India, respectively.
“We’re also on the verge of closing a funding round from an American venture capitalist firm to expand into these territories,” says Mr Singhal, who appeared along with his co-founders on the Indian version of Shark Tank, a business reality show, a year ago.
STAGE is among a growing number of Indian start-ups that are betting big on the rural market opportunity as the next growth frontier. Others include players like Agrostar and DeHaat.
While a bulk of India’s 1.4 billion people still live in its 650,000 villages, they’ve hardly been a market for its booming tech start-ups so far.
Asia’s third-largest economy has been a hotbed for innovation, birthing several dozen unicorns – or tech companies valued at over $1bn – but they’ve all largely built for the “top 10%” of urban Indians, according to Anand Daniel, partner at Accel, which has funded some of the country’s most successful ventures, from Flipkart to Swiggy and Urban Company.
While there have been notable exceptions like online marketplace Meesho, or a few farm technology players, the start-up boom has largely bypassed India’s villages.
That’s now changing as more founders successfully cater to rural consumers and get funded for their ideas.
“Investors don’t show you the door anymore,” says Mr Singhal.
“Five years ago, I didn’t get any money at all. I had to bootstrap the company.”
Accel itself is now cutting more cheques to entrepreneurs solving for the rural market, recently announcing it will invest up to $1m in rural start-ups through its pre-seed accelerator programme.
Unicorn India Ventures, another local VC fund, says 50% of their investments are now in start-ups based in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. And in July this year, the Japanese auto giant Suzuki announced a $40m India fund to invest in start-ups building for rural markets.