Adar Poonawaalla Invests in Jetsynthesis Subsidiary -Wakau

Serum Institute of India’s chief Adar Poonawaalla has picked up a 20% stake in Wakau Interactive Pvt Ltd- A JetSynthesys subsidiary. The community-driven social media platform Wakau offers a unique combination of mobile-first screen experience and short video content in the Entertainment and Fashion domains with an associated video-commerce element. Poonawalla joins the legendary Amitabh Bachchan as Wakau’s league of well-known investors. Launched by new age digital entertainment and technology company JetSynthesys, Wakau has recently bagged AWS’ prestigious “Best B2C Innovation Leveraging Amazon AI/ML Services” award at the Amazon AI Conclave held last week.

With 4 Lakh+ curated user-generated videos and a song library featuring 10000+ curated regional and main media songs for short video along with 25000+ named birthday songs for personalized greeting creation, Wakau currently has more than 5 lakh daily user engagement events. Created with a mission to entertain and promote creativity, Wakau boasts of an excellent user-experience on the back of personalization and cutting-edge technology. With a strong regional focus on content curation and song gallery, Wakau has AI and ML at its core that makes it safer and tailor-made to suit each individual user’s content preferences. The platform can serve 1M+ users concurrently, sees 5000+ daily video uploads, and is scalable with ease, all thanks to the superior tech stack it’s been built on.

Commenting on this development, Adar Poonawalla, Chief Executive Officer of the Serum Institute of India, said, “New content formats like short entertainment and fashion videos are gaining wide scale 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 personalization. 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 monetization 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.”

With a concerted focus across gaming, digital entertainment, and social community platforms, JetSynthesys has, in a short span of time since its launch, seen exponential growth and been the usherer of many category firsts. The company is also known for its global publishing partnerships with the likes of cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar, Bollywood star Salman Khan, heavyweight Floyd Mayweather, and internationally renowned brands like WWE, Square Enix, Warner Music Group (WMG) and many more.

Over the years, JetSynthesys has also become a leading name in the gaming category, particularly known for developing mobile games with high fidelity and network play. It also houses popular games like "Sachin Saga Cricket Champions" and "Real Cricket" is globally the #1 skill-based cricket gaming franchise. In addition to developing cutting edge and popular games in-house, JetSynthesys was the earliest entrant in India’s esports industry, having had a 50% founding stake in India’s largest esports company, Nodwin Gaming. Furthermore, to build esports at the grass-root level, JetSynthesys recently acquired Chennai-based Skyesports to form Jet Skyesports Gaming Pvt. Ltd.

In the social community arena, JetSynthesys is home to 100MB, Sachin Tendulkar's digital platform for all things cricket; ThinkRight.me, India's leading meditation and mindfulness app; AnyDay Money, a well-known fintech platform for advance salary formed in association with Adar Poonawalla; JobDost, a platform providing access to grey & blue-collar jobs in multiple cities across India; and SonicJobs, UK's #1 hiring portal for blue-collared jobs.

The brand is also known for its deep tech stacks in new technologies like AI, Blockchain, AR/VR/MR and quantum computing. With offices in Japan, the UK, EU, US and India, JetSynthesys boasts of the best-in-class technical and creative talent, striving to create and connect digital ecosystems globally.