Omidyar Network India will exit the Indian market by the end of the year 2024 and will not make any new investments in the country, News website Yourstory first reported on 12th December (Tuesday). Omidyar Network is reportedly a self-styled “philanthropic investment firm” comprising a foundation and an impact investment firm.
It was established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, a French-born Iranian-American and his wife Pam. In 2019, Omidyar Network India was carved out of its parent entity, the US-based Omidyar Network.
The Omidyar Network India, however, will keep following up on deals it had committed earlier, as per sources familiar with the development.
Omidyar Group has been active in India since 2010 and has made investments of over $500 million. Out of this nearly $150 million was directed to non-profit investments. It has invested in several startups in India like ZestMoney, DealShare, VerSe (Dailyhunt), Vedantu, 1mg, Bounce, Bijak, Doubtnut, Entri, HealthKart, Indifi, M2P, Pratilipi, and in several media organisations, particularly the leftist portals like Newslaundry.
Confirming the development in an internal blog post which was reviewed by YourStory, the firm stated, “After several months of deliberation, it has been decided that Omidyar Network India will stop making new investments and will completely transition out of the market by the end of 2024. Over the next two months, the board and leadership team will assess how best to manage the organisation’s portfolio while recognising the long and trusted partnerships that the Omidyar Network India team has built.”
In their statement, Omidyar Network India asserted that it has achieved its primary objective of “catalysing impact” and will not make any new investment.
The statement read, “Over the last decade, Omidyar Network India has played a critical role in building the impact investment sector, especially focussed on the Next Half Billion. We are proud of our work in this space, which is now attracting larger pools of capital from local venture capital or impact investors and domestic philanthropists than ever before. Having achieved our primary objective of catalysing impact, Omidyar Network India will not be making any further investments in India.”
Conspicuously, Omidyar Network is known for funding many publications, particularly the leftist portals across India including Scroll(dot)in and Newslaundry.
Omidyar Funded several leftist news portals
Leftist portals like Newslaundry which are under agencies’ scanner for alleged tax evasions and FCRA violations had been receiving funding from Omidyar Network.
In September 2021, the Income Tax department carried out a “survey operation” at the office of the website Newslaundry as part of an investigation into the finances and funding of the organisation.
Back then, an IT official had said, “NewsClick and Newslaundry received Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) at a very high premium while their net worth was very low. There are also gaps in the financials of both the companies, which suggest tax evasion but we are verifying the same.”
Newslaundry received funding from the Odimyar Network in 2016, “to expand its reportage and content production teams, leverage its existing content by increasing its exposure to a larger audience, and experiment with new formats of content creation”.
Newslaundry’s Editor-in-Chief Madhu Trehan in an email response to The Print confirmed that Omidyar Network has been funding Newslaundry. The email read, “If you look at our website, you can see how much stake Omidyar Network owns in Newslaundry. It is up on our website. The amount raised and equity percentage is on what was then the FIPB website, and that is public information.”
According to the Newslaundry website, the majority of the company’s equity is held by its three co-founders, Abhinandan Sekhri, Roopak Kapoor, and Prashant Sareen, and by an impact fund Omidyar Network.
In 2016, the Omidyar Network issued a public statement on its website at the time of investing in Newslaundry. It read, “Our purpose in funding Newslaundry is to invest in a media organisation that is exploring innovative approaches to drive transparency and higher standards throughout the media landscape in India. We also hope that the learnings from Newslaundry’s journey to develop a new business model for independent news production will act as a blueprint for other organisations to follow, develop, and spread.”
Meanwhile, Newsclick founder Prabir Purkayastha has been addressing several events organised by organisations that receive funds from abroad, including from the Omidyar Network.
As per an India Today report, in its initial years in India, Omidyar Network backed around 25 organisations that deal with news and government transparency. These organisations include News Trust, a news-discovery site run by the nonprofit journalism center, the Poynter Institute; the Sunlight Foundation, dedicated to government transparency; and Transparency & Accountability Initiative, an organisation based in London.
In July 2020, Omidyar Network India funded Rs. 10.75 crore for 67 projects under the rapid response funding initiative for COVID-19 across the country. The initiative was launched on 24th March 2020 and it funded organisations like change.org, Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation, and crowdfunding platform Milaap. Another major beneficiary of Omidyar Network is ADR (Association for Democratic Reforms), which also has the Ford Foundation as one of its donors.
In January 2019, Regional language news aggregator Dailyhunt raised Rs 24.61 crore in funding from Omidyar Network and Sequoia Capital among others. Additionally, Verse Innovation, the parent company of Dailyhunt and short video platform Josh, also counts Omidyar Network as its investor.
Apart from that, in 2019, it came to light that the Omidyar Group was one of the donors to Forbidden Stories (FS), a dubious organisation launched with the underlying aim of effectuating regime changes and installing pliant governments in countries across the world that align with the left-liberal ideology and reinforce the primacy of the Left’s narrative.
FS was launched by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Freedom Voices Network. RSF is the same organisation that came up with a dishonest ‘Press Freedom Index‘ to malign India internationally and portray it as a country where journalists are targeted and persecuted for pursuing truth.
The Omidyar Group donated to FS through a front organisation Luminate, whose Strategic Plan for 2018-2022 mentioned “Illiberal democracies’ are emerging,” “Civic space is shrinking, and civil society is under attack,” “Rising populism is creating ruptures in historical party politics,” “Insular, nationalist perspectives are resonating with more people,” and “Communities are becoming more polarized among other things.
While the strategic plan and its animosity towards nationalism made its ideological orientations abundantly clear, it is important to note that the Omidyar Group funded a host of media organisations worldwide, mostly leftist globalist portals such as Scroll.in.
Scroll Media Inc., the operator of the news portal Scroll.in, secured funding from the Omidyar Network in 2014. However, the exact amount of the funding was not disclosed. During that period, Samir Patil, the CEO of Scroll, mentioned, “We cannot disclose the deal size.”
Omidyar and George Soros-linked organisations working in tandem
Additionally, in 2008, the Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF) had joined hands with Omidyar Network, the Indian School of Business (ISB), and Google.org to launch their 17 million SONG fund to boost investment.
Furthermore, Soros’ Foundation and Omidyar Network have also funded $1.3 million to Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), with a long track record of attempts to thrust a biased fact-checking regime on India’s IFCN network.
In September 2023, a coalition of 22 groups, including prominent left-wing organisations pledged more than $500 million to fund local media publications in the next five years, according to an announcement.
The new coalition named “Press Forward” includes many groups that have left-wing bias based on their funding and initiatives. One of the groups in this alliance is Democracy Fund, an organisation run by left-wing billionaire Pierre Omidyar.
According to tax documents obtained by an independent journalist Lee Fang, Democracy Fund reportedly provided a $130,000 grant to the Center for Internet Security to fund a “portal” that was used to flag and censor social media content containing “misinformation” during the 2020 election.
Omidyar’s beneficiary Forbidden Story and its tentacles
It is pertinent to note that apart from Omidyar, other donors to Forbidden Story include George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF), whose attitude towards the Indian Government is well documented, and Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, which is cloaked in a shroud of secrecy.
FS also proudly displayed the endorsement by Mediapart’s Head of Investigations Fabrice Afri on its website until recently. Mediapart is the same leftist French organisation that has been peddling propaganda over the Rafale deal. FS has now removed the page “The support us” altogether from its website.
Incidentally, in July 2021, the leftist news portal Wire published what it called an ‘explosive story‘ involving allegations of spying with spyware Pegasus. The Wire and its partners were fed the information by two very dubious organisations. One was Amnesty International and the other was Forbidden Stories.
The questionable antecedents of the Omidyar Network
In May 2022, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) named the promoters of NGO Omidyar Network and several others including government officials in an FCRA bribery scandal case. The development came after the CBI had filed an FIR regarding a national FCRA funding scam. According to reports, the promoters of NGO Omidyar Network have been under the scanner for allegedly bribing officials to receive FCRA licenses. Additionally, at least 6 to 8 more networks were also under the CBI scanner.
Before that, in September 2021, the Ministry of Home Affairs had put the Omidyar Network under the FCRA watchlist.
In a nutshell, Omidyar Group invested in organisations and efforts that were aimed to dislodge governments and regimes it thought did not align with the “liberal worldview” by bankrolling news organisations, entities, movies, etc that they thought would aid them in building an alternative narrative and challenging the legitimacy of the incumbent governments they did not like. It had been a “catalysing impact” through various organisations that have been cloaked as non-profit, ideologically independent entities but in reality, have been trying to achieve their vested agenda of pliant governments in the host country.
