Azim Lalani and Saurabh Singh Kushwah join ex-Twitter India head, Manish Maheshwari as Fanory co-founders

Fanory, a JetSynthesys-funded tech startup has onboarded Azim Lalani and Saurabh Singh Kushwah as co-founders to bolster its founding team.

They join former Twitter India Head Manish Maheshwari in leading the platform, which helps digital creators monetise their craft directly through their fanbase better than any social media platform.

Lalani, Kushwah, and Maheshwari, previously worked together at Network18 from 2016 to 2019.

Kushwah has previously created OTT platforms for Zee Entertainment and led product initiatives at Republic Media and Network18.

Azim Lalani has previously served as the President of Digital Revenue at TV9 Group and COO of News at Network18 Digital.

“This is the best team I could have hoped for. Having worked with them earlier, I have tremendous trust in Azim and Saurabh and respect for what they bring. With their joining Fanory in India, I would now have the bandwidth to focus on US expansion leveraging our learnings from the India experiment and move to the next trajectory in our journey,” noted Maheshwari, Co-founder of Fanory.

Rajan Navani, Founder and CEO, JetSynthesys, says, "The next untapped opportunity in the Creator Economy is supporting torso and tail creators who struggle to monetize. Big Tech companies are struggling with direct monetization for creators since their platforms are technically built to serve users and drive engagement so that they can sell more adverts. I am glad that Fanory now has a well-staffed team to target this problem area globally.”

Lalani is credited with creating the personal finance platform, Money9, and was among the founding members of Firstpost at Network18. In 2016, he launched Firstpost Studio, where he identified a gap in monetizing creator content.

"The digital media business is unique in the sense that the middlemen (media platforms) have control on the lion's share of the revenue, unlike the ones responsible for producing the goods like in the traditional economy," said Azim, further adding, "We are trying to restore parity by partnering with the creators to give them a platform that gives them avenues to create carefully curated content in different formats, serving their fans delightful experiences and also making the most of it for themselves."

Kushwah is an experienced entrepreneur and product leader who has been developing and managing digital products for over 15 years.

"Monetisation for a creator is a massive challenge that is not easy to crack. It requires personalizing the experience for the user through interactivity. I believe these aspects, supported by our AI-enabled algorithm, help us tap all the monetization opportunities and reduce churn," said Kushwah.

He added, "Our roadmap for this year includes working with content creators and brands to facilitate partnerships without compromising on the end-user experience. This can only be achieved by using predictive analytics capabilities to create premium offerings over and above the regular ones of traditional social media.”