iWorld
Ex-Meta and Viacom officials launch web3 start-up; acquire $8 mn seed funding
Mumbai: Kirthiga Reddy and Saurabh Doshi have co-founded Virtualness, a mobile-first platform designed to help creators and brands navigate the complex world of web3, and have secured over $8 million in seed funding.
Facebook India & South Asia employee #1 and former managing director, Softbank Investment Advisors’ former investment partner Reddy, Meta Asia-Pacific’s former head for entertainment, emerging markets, & greater China region for creators, Viacom Group’s former vice president, and Star India’s Doshi, will leverage their decades of global entrepreneurial experience partnering with creators, media, brands, and tech platforms.
The fundraise was led by Blockchange Ventures and joined by Polygon Ventures, Micron Ventures, Better Ventures, FalconX, Neythri Futures Fund, Carolyn Everson, Randi Zuckerberg, Nusier Yassin (Nas Daily), Anjali Bansal, Ashwini Asokan, Harsh Jain, Sandeep Singhal, Stacy Brown-Philpot, Vani Kola, and other thought leaders.
Zuckerberg and Yassin serve as advisors for the company, along with Curious Addys chief technology officer (CTO) Ben Yu; VidCon former general manager Jim Louderback; Curious Addys CEO Mai Akiyoshi; and OpenSea vice president of products Shiva Rajaraman. They have been at the forefront of creator economy trends and bring extensive expertise across diverse fields, including media, art, entertainment, blockchain, and web3. Their guidance has been instrumental in taking Virtualness from concept to reality and will continue to help shape the global vision.
Virtualness will roll out core capabilities for creators and brands when the platform launches in 2023.
There are more than 300 million creators worldwide, with half of them joining the creator economy in the last two years. Despite this extraordinary migration, these creators lack even the most basic tools to scale their businesses and easily capture the value-creation opportunities that blockchain and web3 represent. Centred on the ethos of “empathy at the core,” Virtualness puts creators first and is building the playbook for easy design, efficient sharing, and seamless digital commerce.
Upon launch in early 2023, authenticated creators and brands will use the platform to design, mint, and showcase branded digital collectibles; easily share across their social media channels; directly interact with their fans and community; enable unique experiences; and unlock new channels for monetisation. Education, personalisation, discovery, integration with web2 and web3 platforms, and a mobile-first experience are core to the platform.
“Creators are the ultimate entrepreneurs. We’ve been at the heart of the web2 ecosystem building and onboarding creators and brands, and we’re on our journey to do it again for web3. People are spending more and more time in various digital worlds and have the desire for customised experiences, individual identities, expressions and personalised commerce,” said Reddy and Doshi, in media reports.
They added, “We’re excited to see how creators and brands mimic various physical experiences in digital forms and in newer ways. This is about building a new economy, unlocked by branded digital collectibles that deliver unique experiences, capabilities, and value. Our belief is that everything that can move from a physical form to digital will move.”
Reddy and Doshi are working closely with creators to inform how they build their products. Nusier Yassin (Nas Daily), a famed creator with more than 50 million followers across social media platforms and an investor in Virtualness, is one of the tech-forward creators helping shape the product from the concept stage.
“Reddy and Doshi lead with hustle, heart, and vision. I have had a ringside view of how they shepherded the transition to a digital and mobile world and onboarded a range of global creators and brands to web2. The depth of their relationships with creators, brands, and the entire ecosystem is unparalleled. Their shared experiences and impact over the last decade give me absolute conviction that they will do the same as they unlock the power of web3 for creators and brands,” said Yassin in the media report.
“Typically, countries outside of the US and Europe get access to features much later. I am confident that this team will unlock opportunities for creators and their fans, no matter where they live. Reddy and Doshi have the rare experience of scaling innovative, user-friendly technology globally with a focus on creator monetization,” added Yassin.
With a core engineering team with a successful track record of collaboration on prior start-ups, Virtualness has bootstrapped a proof of concept on the Polygon chain. The company will use this first round of funding to support a number of key areas, including new hires in engineering, product, and design in the United States, India, Singapore, Dubai, and other parts of the world, helping the company to innovate, expand platform support to additional blockchains, integrate with offline and online experiences — including metaverse platforms — and launch its offerings.
“This is a time of great transformation in the future of work, economic opportunity, and drivers of social change,” said Blockchange Ventures GP Cailleach De Weingart-Ryan.
“Blockchain will have a tremendous impact on businesses and society and we believe Virtualness will be a leader in the next chapter of the generational technology shift the blockchain represents. Reddy and Doshi’s experiences are custom-built to help those who want to tap into web3 but don’t know how. Their ability to navigate cross-cultural differences, expertise on the utility of the blockchain and creator-obsessed approach to building products, is the triple-threat needed to accelerate adoption in web3 at a global scale. As early investors in all aspects of the blockchain revolution, we look forward to partnering with Reddy and Doshi and amplifying their efforts to democratise and unlock value-creation for creators and brands of any size and stage.”
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
