Bengaluru based EloElo Group has raised $80 million in a Series C round led by Hornbill Capital and NBCUniversal, taking its total funding to $130 million to date.
MIT Investment Co joined the round, along with existing investors Play Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Waterbridge Ventures and Griffin Gaming Partners. The company will use the money for original content in local languages, the international launch of Story TV and further investment in Dolphin AI.
What Story TV has built
EloElo Group was founded in Bengaluru in 2020 by Saurabh Pandey, a former Flipkart executive. Its flagship platform Story TV now offers more than 5,000 microdramas across six languages, with a new drama launched every three hours.
Users spend an average of 95 minutes on Story TV every day, and EloElo Group reports more than 40 million monthly active users across its apps and more than 300 million installs in total. The company says it achieved multi-fold revenue growth over the last year.
That scale rests on three parts of the business that EloElo Group owns, namely the content, the distribution and the AI powered production engine. Dolphin AI sits at the centre of that engine, and it was built first for EloElo Group’s own production work before being opened up more widely.
Dolphin AI was unveiled on 29 September 2026 at FICCI FRAMES in Mumbai as an agentic AI studio for end to end video production. The platform is designed to turn scripts into structured, multi-shot productions, and EloElo Group’s teams test more than 100,000 creative assets every month.
“A billion people now reach for the phone before any other screen, and the entertainment built for them will be video first, in their own language, in episodes that fit their day. Story TV shows us what India wants to watch, and Dolphin AI gives us the economics to make it, which is how we have scaled with solid unit economics.”
Saurabh Pandey, Founder and CEO, EloElo Group
Why phone first drama is drawing big backing
Microdrama is growing fast as a mobile format. Research firm Omdia expects the format to generate $14 billion globally by the end of 2026, while Redseer estimates that 40 million people in India paid for a microdrama at least once in FY26.
Lumikai projects that the Indian microdrama market will reach $4.5 billion by 2030, which would put a format that barely existed a few years ago close to the scale of traditional streaming video in India.
For a company that already leads the format at home, that projection makes international expansion a logical next step rather than a leap.
The two lead investors bring different strengths to that step. Hornbill Capital is an India focused investment firm founded in 2014 by Manoj Thakur, and it backs AI and data driven businesses including PhysicsWallah, KreditBee, Dhan and Nazara Technologies.
NBCUniversal is one of the world’s leading media and entertainment companies, with brands including NBC and Peacock and a global studio portfolio.
“EloElo Group combines strong creative capabilities with the ability to scale content through technology, which is something we deeply believe in. The team’s execution, financial discipline, and AI capabilities position it well for its next phase of growth.”
Manoj Thakur, Founder and Managing Partner, Hornbill Capital
What the money changes next
The immediate priorities are premium originals, a sharper focus on content across languages, deeper investment in Dolphin AI and the launch of Story TV in international markets including the United States. Avendus Capital acted as the exclusive financial adviser on the funding round.
The next test is not demand for short drama, which the audience figures already show, but whether premium originals and AI led production can travel across languages and markets without losing the local stories that built Story TV.
That balance will decide whether this round becomes a global business or simply a larger Indian one.
