Rainshine Global Founder Neeraj Bhargava on Creating Media 3.0

I can be best described as a serial entrepreneur or a serial founder. I have had the good fortune of previously taking a startup all the way to an initial public offering (IPO) (WNS, which is now traded on the New York Stock Exchange) and building several others to valuable strategic sales. I look for two things before taking a plunge into a new startup. Is there an industry transformation opportunity, and can I motivate the right kind of talent to team up with me and build something we all can be proud of? Rainshine Global, in the media and entertainment sector, met both these criteria, and so here I am.

My co-founder, Anuraag Srivastava, and I have worked together at both WNS and other startups before. Both of us also privately and together invested in a bunch of media and tech startups, and when we saw the explosive growth in the creator economy globally, we saw an opportunity we could not resist and started Rainshine in late 2018. Subsequently, we brought in a stellar management team and an experienced group of board members, including Arun Sarin, who ran Vodafone globally; Michael Montgomery, who was in the founding team of DreamWorks; and David Johnson, who ran EMI Music. The rest, as they say, is history. We have a vibrant and exciting company poised to uniquely combine content and tech under the same umbrella and build a global leader.

There are several global content studios and also several others building blockchain platforms for content distribution. Where Rainshine Global is differentiated is that we uniquely combine our ability to source and nurture creative talent and content intellectual properties and provide creators the ability to go directly to fans and build enduring and profitable fan communities. Hardly anyone in the market is today thinking as expansively and deeply as we are about how to bring the next-generation tech and creators together. We call it Media 3.0, a Web3-enabled way of operating the $2 trillion media and entertainment industry that is transformative, scalable, and liberating for creators.

As we enter into raising a new round, we ensure through our fundraising from both existing and new investors that we always maintain a minimum of six months of runway.

We are a revenue-earning business, and in our last fiscal year ending March 2022, our pro forma revenue (including a small tuck-in acquisition) was $16.6 million. We are well-positioned to grow by at least 50% in the coming year. We earn revenue through sale and license of content from our studio business and through licensing of technology and distribution cuts from our blockchain business.

We are targeting a large and rapidly changing $2 trillion global industry. We have a stellar global team that has a startup-to-IPO track record and has scaled businesses globally. We are in the perfect sweet spot of the intersection between the rapidly growing creator economy and Web3 technology. We are earning revenue and growing rapidly, with fabulous industry and talent relationships across the world. There is a lot to like about us.

Our primary focus is to build a great company, and if we do that, exit options emerge anyway. Having said that, we believe that within the next two to three years, we can get to a point where Rainshine Global will be a valuable company with many exit options.