Digital storytelling and publishing platform Pratilipi plans to start discussions with investment bankers in September and aims to appoint a banker by October as it prepares for an initial public offering (IPO), co-founder and CEO Ranjeet Pratap Singh said.
The company is about 95% ready internally for the IPO, with most compliance requirements completed, Singh said. The process from appointing a banker to an IPO typically takes around eight months, although the timeline could vary depending on market conditions, he said.
Pratilipi is targeting revenue of about Rs 400 crore in FY27, Singh said, with literature and Westland Books expected to be the main contributors. The literature business generated about Rs 100 crore last year and is being targeted at roughly Rs 200 crore this year, he said.
Westland's monthly revenue rose to Rs 9.1 crore in June from about Rs 1.1-1.2 crore a month last year. Singh expects it to reach Rs 20-25 crore a month by March.
The company has expanded beyond online storytelling into physical publishing, comics, audio, microdramas and IP licensing. Singh said Pratilipi's longer-term ambition is to build an integrated IP ecosystem in which stories can travel across languages, formats and geographies, rather than remain an online literature platform.
Westland's direct-to-consumer business, launched in November 2025, generated Rs 7.3 crore in June, Singh said. He expects Pratilipi to become larger than Penguin's India business within 18-20 months, driven partly by its D2C publishing business.
Pratilipi is targeting Rs 400 crore in FY27 revenue, while its standalone business could reach a Rs 500 crore annualised exit run-rate by the end of the year, Singh said. The Rs 500 crore figure refers to the pace of revenue at the end of the year, rather than full-year FY27 revenue.
Singh said Pratilipi's partnership with TikTok had exceeded the company's initial expectations.
The company had expected its shows to generate around 40-60 million views but recorded 500 million views in June across 41 shows, he said.
Pratilipi had previously produced 21 shows under the partnership announced in May and had added another 20 in the later months. The company is now producing around 10 shows a month, Singh said.
He said the performance had led to discussions with seven to eight other global players, with at least 10 enterprise-level conversations active at the time of the interview.
Pratilipi has produced around 150 microdrama shows, Singh said. The company intends to focus on supplying content to platforms rather than building a large consumer-facing microdrama platform of its own.
Singh said the strategy was driven by the high cost and competitiveness of acquiring consumer demand. Pratilipi instead wants to supply content to platforms.
He said content costs account for about 15-20% of revenue in microdrama, compared with 50-60% for long-form content.
AI is also being used to reduce the time required to produce and adapt content, Singh said. A 45-panel comics chapter that previously took about eight days can now be produced as 60 panels in about six hours. He said about 90% of Pratilipi's comics output is now produced at a pace of roughly one chapter a day.
AI is also being used for multilingual adaptation. Singh said the company previously produced only five to 10 such adaptations a year but is now looking at 3,000-5,000 language and format adaptations a month.
Pratilipi paid about Rs 3.5 crore to 10,000-11,000 writers in June, while its top writers earn more than Rs 10 lakh a month, according to Singh.
