‘We are the confidence stack of India': Stage’s Vinay Singhal on reviving regional cultures through OTT

Stage co-founder Vinay Singhal at Rising Bharat Summit 2025

Vinay Singhal, the co-founder of regional streaming service Stage, believes they are building the confidence layer of the country through their platform.

"Once people start feeling comfortable with the idea of who they are, they feel confident, and that's how societies thrive. Like there's an India Stack, we are the confidence stack of this country," Singhal said during a panel discussion at the News18 Rising Bharat Summit 2025 on April 8. The panel also consisted of Archian Foods co-founder Saurabh Munjal and Wiom founder Satyam Darmora.

Singhal said that India is a confluence of many different cultures, but we keep feeling less about ourselves because of a "huge colonial baggage".

"We suppress our own culture and carry an inferiority complex around it. Also, because of the informality of our cultures, they never came out. I grew up in Haryana speaking Haryanvi, but I was like, why is it that no one does Haryanvi content?"

Started in 2019, Stage started off as a streaming service for Haryanvi shows and films. It has since expanded to Rajasthani and, more recently, Bhojpuri content.

"Haryanvi and Rajasthani are markets where there was no film industry that existed before us. We had to go and create an entire movie industry from scratch," he said. This is because dialects like Haryanvi don't have their script, due to which they don't have their own literature or cinema.

However, Singhal noted that in today's environment, we no longer need literature to make films or theaters to distribute films, thanks to streaming platforms. "We chose constructive storytelling as a way to promote cultures, and OTT became the medium", he said.

In this endeavour, Stage discovered various forms of artists, including poets, comedians, folk performers, and theatre artists and funded their first-ever movies and web show projects, Singhal said.

"Haryana today has 150 production houses which work with us regularly. We produce 50 original movies in each of these three markets (Haryanvi, Rajasthani, and Bhojpuri) every year, which is almost half of the entire regional industry in this country," he said.

Singhal added, "We are a company to promote India's regional cultures, and today, we do that through making high quality, incredible movies and web shows in those local cultures. Tomorrow, if it takes us to making Disneyland for each one, then we will make that as well to promote these cultures"

"Five years from now, every single regional culture of India and every Indian who comes from them would be proud of their cultural identity and will never have to feel any sort of inferiority complex because they come from a certain background. That would be the real success for Stage" he said.

In March, Stage raised $12.5 million in Series B funding led by Goodwater Capital and Blume Ventures to accelerate its expansion. The company said it plans to use the funds raised to expand into new cultures while strengthening its presence in existing ones.

Stage claims to have garnered over 20 million app installs to date. It has around 4.4 million paying households and an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of Rs 180 crore.

The startup claims that it has witnessed 286 percent growth in subscribers and a 289 percent surge in revenue in the past year, driven by its original titles such as Videshi Bahu (Haryanvi), Kaand 2010 (Haryanvi), and Bhawani (Rajasthani) and national award winning Dada Lakhmi featuring Bollywood veterans like Yashpal Sharma.

During the panel discussion, Singhal also dismissed the narrative that people in rural areas, also referred to as Bharat, don't pay for digital content.

"People who think Bharat doesn't pay for digital content have a limited understanding. It's a lazy statement made from an AC office because they don't have in them to go out on the ground and find out if people are ready to pay or not," he said.

Singhal said these people "never asked what Bharat wants and what they are ready to pay for. Even our country's startup founders have shown stepchild behaviour towards the people of Bharat"