Against all odds: How four pratilipi colleagues built India’s most profitable co |
India’s consumer app ecosystem has long operated on a familiar formula: raise large rounds, burn aggressively on user acquisition, and defer profitability indefinitely. Primetrace Technologies, the consumer AI company behind Kutumb, Crafto AI, and a growing portfolio of category-leading apps, has rewritten that formula entirely. With a ₹550 crore annual revenue run rate, ₹200 crore in EBITDA, and 350 million cumulative app downloads, Primetrace has delivered 50x revenue growth in three years—on just $30 million in total funding from Tiger Global and Peak XV Partners.
What makes this story remarkable is not the numbers alone but the origin. In late 2019, Abhishek Kejriwal, then a product leader at Pratilipi—a regional-language storytelling platform—ran a scrappy Facebook ad across Hindi-speaking India. The copy was disarmingly simple: “Want to build an app for free?” The idea was to see what people in non-metro India actually wanted from technology. The responses were overwhelming. Community leaders across tier-2 and tier-3 cities—nursing guilds, teachers’ unions, caste associations—described the same frustration: WhatsApp groups were chaotic, Facebook Groups offered no control, and no platform existed for structured community management, secure donations, or targeted........