Internet company Tencent and Times Internet, the online services subsidiary of media group Bennett, Coleman & Co, are investing $115m in India-based music streaming platform Gaana, Bloomberg reported today.
Tencent and Gaana confirmed to Bloomberg that a deal was taking place but did not offer further details about how much capital each investor is providing.
Gaana’s online music streaming platform was launched by Times Internet in 2010 and offers both a free version supported by advertising and a premium subscription service costing $3.99 a month or $33.99 a year.
In addition to sorting songs by categories such as genre and artist, Gaana also allows users to select music by languages such as English, Hindi, Tamil, Punjbai and Bengali.
Tencent already operates music streaming services Joox and Tencent Music. The latter is expected to go public this year, and Tencent has been an investor in another music streaming platform, Spotify, since December 2017.
Satyan Gajwani, vice-chairman of Times Internet, helped bring Tencent to the table for the deal, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
Gaana had previously received an undisclosed amount of funding from consumer electronics producer Micromax in 2015 as part of an agreement to make the streaming service available on Micromax’s smartphones.