NDTV forays into the online wedding market space with Special Occasions Limited

NDTV’s Special Occasion Limited, a wedding and festival platform, has raised funding at a valuation of 20 million USD.

A US based venture capital firm, CerraCap Ventures has invested in NDTV’s forthcoming wedding venture. “The wedding industry in India is a $40bn market which is highly disorganized and has operated the same way for decades. With India’s growing tech savvy populous; this market is ripe for disruption. Special Occasions has the right team, vision and platform to enable this disruption and be a leader in this space” said Saurabh Suri, Managing Partner CerraCap Ventures.

Smeeta Chakrabarti President Revenue NDTV Group quotes, “I am delighted to welcome CerraCap and Saurabh Suri as a partner in this exciting venture. The wedding business in India is growing at huge 20% year on year. There are 10 million weddings every year in India and this is a massive opportunity. Not just weddings, festival spending is also huge and this platform will be the go to destination when you are getting married or attending a wedding or celebrating any special occasion.”

Speaking about the investment, Vikram Chandra, Group CEO NDTV says, “This investment is a validation of our digital strategy.  We have been able to demonstrate our capability with indianroots.com, gadget360.com, carandbike.com, all of which have seen keen investor interest. Weddings’ is yet another business where we already have a high brand recall through our marquee shows in the wedding space.  We are confident that with CerraCap’s investments, we will be able to roll the latest of the NDTV ecommerce ventures, successfully.”

According to Tuhin Mishra, Managing Director of Baseline, a sports marketing, entertainment & licensing firm responsible for the partnership between NDTV & CerraCap, “It is always a pleasure to work with a NDTV enterprise and to facilitate CerraCap’s foray into this venture of NDTV. We are very excited with this tie up and are so gungho about the concept of wedding and festival ecommerce that Baseline too would be investing into this.”

NDTV also announces the appointment of Sachin Singhal as a CEO of Special Occasion Limited. With 10 years of experience in key startups in the country, Sachin has been instrumental in setting and scaling up leading brands like naaptol.com, and letsbuy.com among others. Sachin is a technology entrepreneur and started his career with Tata consultancy services.

Sachin Singhal says “People are looking for answers on how to achieve their dream wedding.. How to navigate from dream to reality.. The new platform will be a game changer and will provide 360 degree solutions in the wedding and festival space. With the growing internet population and the adoption of smart phones, this space will disrupt too.”

With this launch, NDTV establishes itself more firmly in the digital and ecommerce space.