Serum Institute of India chief Adar Poonawalla has picked up a 20 per cent stake in Wakau Interactive Pvt Ltd. Wakau is a community-driven social-media platform that offers a combination of mobile-first screen experience and short video content in entertainment and fashion domains with an associated video-commerce element.
Amitabh Bachchan is also one of the investors in Wakau. It was launched by new-age digital entertainment and technology company JetSynthesys, and it recently bagged Amazon Web Services’ ‘Best B2C Innovation Leveraging Amazon AI/ML Services’ award.
Wakau currently has more than 5 lakh daily user engagement events. It has 4 lakh-plus curated user-generated videos and a song library featuring over 10,000 curated regional and main media songs for short video, along with 25,000-plus named birthday songs for personalised greeting creation. The platform can serve over one million users concurrently, sees 5,000-plus daily video uploads, and is scalable with ease, all thanks to the superior tech stack it’s been built on.
Adar Poonawalla, CEO, Serum Institute, said: “New content formats like short entertainment and fashion videos are gaining popularity, and Wakau, leveraging its advanced AI-based tech stack, has made it so easy, creative, fun and safe for consumers with its high levels of personalisation. I’d like to congratulate the team on the AI award and am delighted to join this juggernaut of possibilities with Wakau as it sets off on its next phase of growth.”
Rajan Navani, Vice-Chairman & Managing Director, JetSynthesys, added: “We created Wakau with one goal, to entertain users and promote creativity. It empowers the creator community with both distribution and monetisation of content through new-age mechanisms like NFTs. Short video sharing social-media platforms have been seeing great traction from users since the last couple of years. Now no longer just a form of expression, the digital realm helps you build connections, a community of followers, and now make a mark in the metaverse. We’ve consistently leveraged various AI/ML service offerings from AWS in combination with in-house developed Data Science models to maintain content quality, filter out inappropriate content to provide a safer experience for users, develop new features and designs based on user requirements and serve the best content as per the user’s preference and interest while keeping them engaged. Adar has been privy to the team’s work done so far and sees the tremendous potential that the platform has. We’re thrilled to have him with us on the journey in official capacity now, alongside Big B, and we look forward to jointly unlocking newer milestones for Wakau in the future.”
