01 · The company
Ten years, about ₹10 crore a year now, and a business that refuses to grow the easy way.
The Ken launched paid subscriptions on 3 October 2016 and turned ten this week. It has raised about $4.1M in a decade, which is less than many seed rounds today. It built the business without display advertising, and as of 2019 had never spent on paid acquisition. Its revenue was about ₹10 crore in each of the last two reported years.
The company in eight numbers
Each number comes from a filing or from The Ken's own posts. Where I estimate, I say so.
Ten years in 24 moves
A selection. The full list of sources is on the sources page.
- 201617 Jul: The first story, on Rocket Internet and GoJavas, draws a defamation suit filed in Hajipur, Bihar. A court in Hajipur issues an interim order against it, and the story comes down.
- 20163 Oct: Paid launch, one story each weekday. Paytm sponsors the free plan. The Ken says it broke even on cash flow in week 2.
- 2017Feb: Angel round of more than $400K, from 11 founders and operators including Girish Mathrubootham and Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
- 2017Apr: Emails subscribers "We're deleting some of your data". Collects only name and email, and later removes third-party trackers.
- 2017Sep: The Supreme Court stays the two Bihar defamation suits. Nov: iOS and Android apps launch, for paying subscribers only.
- 2018Apr: Praveen Gopal Krishnan joins as Head of Product. The Ken says it is profitable with 15 people, and that more than 90% of subscribers have the app installed.
- 2018Jul: $1.5M Series A led by Omidyar Network, at about $5.45M post-money. Corporate and campus plans launch.
- 2019Jan: More than 10,000 paying subscribers, with "not a single rupee" spent on paid acquisition and no trials. Jul: The Nutgraf newsletter starts. Co-founder Ashish K Mishra leaves and later co-founds The Morning Context.
- 2020Feb–Mar: The Ken Southeast Asia launches as its own subscription.
- 2021Jan: First podcast, Unofficial Sources, reaches #1 in Business on Apple Podcasts India. Sep: 30,000+ subscribers and 150 corporate clients, with one salesperson. Oct: Seven newsletters launch at once.
- 2022Mar: The Stack, a newsletter-only plan at ₹1,999. May: The Ken withdraws its suit against The Morning Context. Dec: Daybreak launches. Wins a Google News Initiative grant to "deconstruct the paywall".
- 2023Feb: Publishes its AI policy: AI will not write at The Ken. Aug: ₹16 Cr Series B from Rainmatter (Zerodha) and Baskar Subramanian, with 45,000+ premium subscribers. Nov: Full redesign.
- 2024Mar: Highlights and inline comments. May: Apps rebuilt and an iPad app launched. Jul: Two by Two, the first paid podcast. Aug: 30-day free trial. Oct: Southeast Asia shut down.
- 2025Apr: First ticketed event, and Make India Competitive Again launches. Aug: AI policy tightened: "not even headlines". Sep: The Nutgraf ends after six years. Nov: First Indian publisher on Spotify Open Access.
- 2026Feb: CPO roadmap post and a corporate page redesign. Mar: In-house semantic search and recommendations. Mar: Intermission, the first video podcast, sponsored by Zerodha. Apr: A new company, Kenrise Print Media, appears in registry data. Aug: Zero Shot ends. Oct: The Ken turns 10.
Read this first
Seema Singh's letter, published today
The 10th-anniversary letter has the most candid line any founder has written about this business:
"As a co-founder, I find this the most challenging time for our business model."Seema Singh, Editor & Co-founder, 5 Oct 2026
She describes an ABB executive walking up to her at an event and saying "Perplexity is killing you." She credits the product-and-engineering teams led by Praveen and Iqbal by name. She also restates the line on AI: it will not write stories "not whole stories, not parts of stories, not even headlines."
Every idea on this site keeps to that line. AI can work everywhere around the story, but never inside it.
A pattern worth noticing
The Ken shipped several things early
- Gift links to paywalled stories, which The Ken says came before the New York Times.
- Corporate plans sold self-serve, with published per-seat prices, from 2018.
- Patron plans: one reader pays for a stranger, or for a whole college.
- Spotify Open Access, the first Indian organisation to use it.
- Semantic search on its own servers, rather than an outside AI API.
Money in, money out
The Ken is small and careful with money. Its whole ten-year total of about $4.1M is about a seventh of the $30M Semafor raised in one round this January. That shapes every product idea: a good idea here has to pay for itself quickly.
| Round | When | Amount | Led by / notable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Angel 1 | Feb 2017 | >$400K | Girish Mathrubootham, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Aprameya R, and 8 others |
| Angel 2 | Mar 2018 | ₹1.47 Cr | JP Morgan directors, Graticule |
| Series A | Jul 2018 | $1.5M | Omidyar Network. About $5.45M post-money |
| Series B | Aug 2023 | ₹16 Cr | Rainmatter (Zerodha), Baskar Subramanian (Amagi). Primary and secondary |
| Total | ~$4.1M | Founders hold about 30% (Tracxn cap table) |
| Kenrise Media | FY24 | FY25 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | ₹10.7 Cr | ₹9.8 Cr | −8.1% |
| Expenses | ~₹13.7 Cr | ₹12.7 Cr | −7% |
| Net result | ~−₹2.9 Cr | −₹2.9 Cr | flat |
| Net margin | ~−27% | −29% |
Source: MCA filings as compiled by Inc42 Datalabs. Tofler's free summary shows a smaller FY24 loss (a −1.1% net margin), so the FY24 line is uncertain. I found no reliable figures before FY24.
The subscriber line stops in 2023
The Ken disclosed its paying-subscriber count often in its early years. The last figure is from the Series B announcement. Since then, marketing says "5,00,000+ subscribers", which counts free sign-ups as well.
Paying subscribers, as disclosed by The Ken
Thousands. Nothing has been disclosed since Aug 2023
| Date | What The Ken said |
|---|---|
| Jan 2019 | More than 10,000 paying, active subscribers. More than 50 organisations |
| Sep 2021 | More than 30,000 subscribers, 150 corporate customers, about 98% on 1- or 3-year plans |
| Aug 2023 | More than 45,000 premium subscribers |
| Aug 2024 | 500,000+ free subscribers |
| Feb 2026 | Over 200 corporate teams |
Growth from 10K to 30K took 32 months. Growth from 30K to 45K took 23 months. Since then revenue has fallen 8% in a year while list prices stayed the same. That points to flat or falling paid readers, or more discounting. I'd want to see which.
Pricing, and three things that don't line up
The prices below are from the web pricing page and the App Store listing, checked on 5 October 2026.
Basic ₹3,245. Premium Duo ₹9,999 for two. Prices include GST, so Premium is ₹4,200 before tax. There is no monthly plan on the web.
21% more than the same plan on the web. The app is the only place to buy monthly, at ₹1,499 a month. Twelve months of that is ₹17,988, 3.6 times the web annual price.
Before GST, with a 10-seat minimum. ₹4,000 for 10–24 seats, falling to ₹2,500 for 250+. Self-serve since 2018, with an admin dashboard. The corporate page was redesigned in Feb 2026.
"Do you offer any discounts?"
The FAQ answers "Sorry, no." The same page offers 50% off for students, and separate pages offer 10% alumni discounts for about 26 institutes.
How many devices?
The pricing page says Premium allows 2 simultaneous browser sessions plus 2 app devices. The paywall on a story page says "Upto three devices allowed". The FAQ gives a third version.
"5,00,000+ subscribers"
The pricing page says the product is "Read by 5,00,000+ subscribers globally". The last paid figure was 45,000. A careful reader, which is The Ken's customer, may notice the gap.
What The Ken stopped doing
Few media companies shut down their own products. The Ken has closed at least 11 newsletters, 5 podcasts and an entire regional edition, including the newsletter its CPO wrote for six years. Being willing to stop things is one of the company's most useful habits.
| Product | Type | Ran | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Ken Southeast Asia | Edition | 2020–2024 | "We couldn't find enough subscribers who were consistently interested." |
| The Nutgraf | Newsletter + audio | 2019–2025 | Written by Praveen Gopal Krishnan, billed as "India's largest paid newsletter" |
| Zero Shot | Column + podcast | 2025–2026 | About 100 editions, ended Aug 2026, folded into "Intelligence Independence" |
| Tokenised · Moneyball | Newsletters | 2021–2022 | Crypto and sports, from the batch of seven launched in Oct 2021 |
| Tech x Policy | Newsletter | –2023 | |
| Day Zero · Strait Up | Newsletters | –2024 | Strait Up was the Southeast Asia newsletter |
| Green Margins · Inciting Incident · Ed Set Go | Newsletters | 2021–2025 | Climate, narrative and education |
| Unofficial Sources · Cost to Company · The First Two Years | Podcasts | 2021–2024 | Unofficial Sources hit #1 in Business on Apple Podcasts India |
Still live: 8 subscriber newsletters (Make India Competitive Again, Trade Tricks, Long and Short, Ka-Ching!, Two by Two, The Collection, First Principles, 90,000 Hours), 2 free ones, and the podcasts Daybreak (about 850 episodes), Two by Two, First Principles and Intermission. The 90,000 Hours newsletter has had no new edition since January 2026, and the Make India Competitive Again audio edition none since December 2025.
The 2025 shift: from one revenue line to several
In 2021 Rohin Dharmakumar described a deliberately narrow business to the Reuters Institute. By 2026, much of that had been reversed on purpose.
"We've never earned a dollar in advertising or sponsorships… We've never done events… Our biggest enemies are attention span and churn."Rohin Dharmakumar to the Reuters Institute, Sep 2021
- Ticketed events since April 2025, at ₹4,000 a seat, with a "Sponsor an event" page
- Intermission, a video podcast sponsored by Zerodha, with a disclosure
- A speakers bureau, with Rohin, Praveen and Seetharaman available to book
- Narrative Thinking workshops sold to companies
- A case competition with partners such as Pine Labs and Delhivery
- Corporate and campus plans, with an admin dashboard
Who runs product
Product and engineering are a small team. Most of what is below comes from The Ken's own team page and blog.
Chief Product Officer
Praveen Gopal Krishnan
NIT Trichy (electronics) and IIM Bangalore. Did handwriting-recognition research at Read-Ink, then was one of Myntra's earliest product managers. Spent about five years at InMobi as Director of Product Management for brand advertising, where he built the InMobi Marketing Partners platform and its analytics. Joined The Ken as Head of Product in April 2018, then served as COO, and has signed as CPO since 2025.
He is also a writer: six years of The Nutgraf, co-host of Two by Two, and co-host of Zero Shot until August 2026. He gives an annual guest lecture at IIM Bangalore.
- "The Ken is a forge. Most others have become factories."
- A question he asks product manager candidates: "why is the search experience at all news websites so bad?"
- His observation that visitors search for their own employer to see whether The Ken covers it, and that this is one of the main routes to a subscription.
- He invites subscribers to send bugs and ideas to him directly.
| Person | Role |
|---|---|
| Rohin Dharmakumar | Co-founder & CEO. Hosts First Principles; co-hosts Two by Two and Intermission |
| Seema Singh | Co-founder & Editor |
| MD Iqbal Ansari | Head of Engineering. The first full-stack developer |
| Karan Kumar Sekar | Product Manager (ex-Whatfix) |
| Ritika Sanikere | Product Designer (ex-Condé Nast subscriptions) |
| Sushmita Vavilala | Product Designer. Wrote the semantic search post |
| Indrajith Iyer | Product Analyst |
| Pranav Pate · Adhavan RK | Growth · BizOps (ran the 30-day trial launch) |
| Sthaman Kamath | Corporate partnerships & sales |
Stack: WordPress on the web, React Native apps, Mixpanel and Google Tag Manager for analytics, Cloudflare in front. I found no Head of Growth on the team page.
Questions I'd ask Praveen
These are things the public record can't answer. The answers would decide where effort pays off most.
1. What does a paying reader bring in?
Revenue per disclosed subscriber is about ₹2,178, roughly half the Premium list price. How is that split across individual, corporate, campus and student plans?
2. Where do renewals break?
In 2021, about 98% of subscribers were on 1- or 3-year plans, with no refunds or pauses. That makes the renewal date the one moment that decides each year's revenue. What is the renewal rate in the first year, and does it differ by how the reader joined?
3. Is search converting?
Semantic search went live in March 2026. Has the share of searchers who subscribe gone up? Which queries get no good answer?
4. What is Kenrise Print Media for?
A new related company and an object-clause change toward video and sound in 2026. Is a print product or a video studio coming, and what does product need to have ready for it?