There is a generation of Indians in their early twenties who grew up watching Rusk Media’s content without ever knowing the company’s name. They know Battleground. They know School Friends. They know Hafta Vasooli. They have watched Truth or Trouble on Instagram and Playground on YouTube and Bharat Ke Super Founders on Amazon MX Player. They did not watch it because an algorithm pushed it to them once. They watched it because it felt like it was made for them, specifically, in the language they actually speak, about the situations they actually recognise, with a production quality that did not look like someone had simply pointed a phone at two people talking in a living room.
That is the business that Karanvir Sofat, Mayank Yadav and Shantanu Singh have been building since 2019 from their office in New Delhi. And in October 2025, IvyCap Ventures put ₹103 crore behind it in a Series B round, joined by LC Nueva, InfoEdge Ventures, Woori Venture Partners, and the company’s own promoters and family investors. The capital is earmarked for three things: building new intellectual properties, scaling existing formats to audiences in the US, Europe and the EMEA region, and deepening the micro-drama segment on Alright TV, the company’s own streaming app.
The numbers that sit behind this raise are worth spending some time on because they tell a story that the Indian digital entertainment market does not tell often enough. Rusk Media generates nearly one billion monthly views across more than 40 owned and partner channels. It has produced more than 50 seasons across more than 20 owned IPs, which means it does not just create content on behalf of platforms. It owns the intellectual property, controls the distribution, and retains the commercial value when a format travels internationally. In an industry where most independent production houses sell their content to the highest bidder and lose all downstream value, owning the IP is the structural advantage that separates a media company from a content factory.
The Bharat Ke Super Founders story deserves specific attention because it represents something genuinely new in Indian media. Co-created with startup debt platform Recur Club, the show is a startup reality format that ran on Amazon MX Player and positioned itself very deliberately apart from the dramatic eliminations and manufactured conflict that have defined the genre in India. It focused instead on actual entrepreneurial decisions, real mentorship interactions, and the kind of slow, unglamorous progress that building a business actually involves. The audience responded. The show ranked number one on the Ormax streaming charts for seven consecutive weeks, maintained a 7.9 IMDb rating, drew over 400 million views, and directly facilitated more than ₹130 crore in funding commitments to the startups featured on it. Season two is already in development.
What Bharat Ke Super Founders proved is that Gen-Z audiences in India are not only interested in entertainment but also in aspiration content that is grounded in recognisable reality. They are watching founders who look like them, talking about problems they understand, navigating systems they have grown up inside. The show turned content into a pipeline, and the pipeline turned viewers into an economic ecosystem. That is a media model that very few companies in India have figured out, and Rusk Media has now done it twice, once with its fiction and unscripted entertainment IPs and once with entrepreneurship reality programming.
“Rusk Media has demonstrated remarkable innovation in building new-age entertainment for Gen-Z audiences. Their ability to combine India’s storytelling heritage with global-first execution makes them a category leader. We are delighted to partner with Rusk as they scale their IPs worldwide and lead the evolution of digital-first entertainment.”
Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner, IvyCap Ventures
The global expansion ambition is the part of this story that requires the most careful examination, because it is where the most significant questions and the most significant opportunity both live. Indian content has broken out globally before, primarily through diaspora audiences and through platforms like Netflix picking up specific titles. But building a Gen-Z entertainment brand that commands original attention in the US and European markets, not just among Indian-origin viewers but among native audiences, is a genuinely different challenge. The micro-drama format, which Rusk Media is aggressively scaling on Alright TV, may be the format best suited to this expansion because it is short, culturally translatable, easily localised and designed for exactly the kind of scroll-to-watch consumption behaviour that characterises Gen-Z media habits in every market.
The company’s total funding across five rounds now stands at approximately $29.88 million. That is a relatively lean capitalisation for a company generating nearly a billion monthly views, which is either a sign of disciplined building or a constraint that has limited how aggressively the company has expanded, possibly both. The ₹103 crore Series B gives it the resource to find out which interpretation is more accurate. The competitive landscape in Gen-Z digital entertainment globally is fierce. But Rusk Media has the content catalogue, the audience relationship, the IP ownership structure and now the capital to press that advantage. Whether Indian storytelling scales globally the way Korean storytelling has will partly be answered by companies like this one.
