Billionaire Mukesh Ambani has a wide array of businesses and a long string of business partners. One of his most successful and innovative business partners is Rishi Malhotra, who is the brains behind the development of the JioSaavn app.
JioSaavn is considered to be “India’s home-grown Spotify”, with millions of songs, podcasts, and audiobooks available on the platform. Rishi Malhotra is the co-founder and CEO of Saavn and took the company to a new height through his business acumen.
Rishi Malhotra grew up in Tennessee, Nashville in the United States, but remained tied with Indian musicians, listing to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Lata Mangeshkar, and Pankaj Udhas, as well as Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis.
Seeing the potential in the music streaming services, Rishi Malhotra and the other co-founders Vinodh Bhat and Paramdeep Singh, started Saavn as a B2B business, where they digitized Indian music and sold it to iTunes and Amazon. At the time, they were about to earn Rs 63 lakh per month through Saavn.
Realizing the true potential of Saavn, Rishi Malhotra had told Mint, “We thought, why not build a service where you can search for anything, the song title, name of film, composer, actor and even if you misspell it, we should be able to serve you.”
The prototype for the Saavn app was launched in 2010 when smartphones made an entry in India. Just two years after Spotify was created, Rishi and the co-founders launched Saavn, with a similar model but for Indian music of all genres and languages.
Soon, the success of Saavn caught the eye of Mukesh Ambani, who wanted the music app to become a part of the Jio network. By investing a hefty amount in the company, Mukesh Ambani’s Jio announced its merger with Saavn, and the app was renamed as JioSaavn.
The 2018 deal was worth over USD 1 billion, which comes out to be over Rs 8300 crore. The app is available for both Android and iOS, with freemium services.
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