Indian serial entrepreneur Vipul Agarwal is betting $3 million that the next superhero universe won’t have an American accent.
In a world saturated with content, Agarwal believes the next Marvel or Harry Potter will emerge not from New York or Los Angeles, but from the culturally rich landscapes of India, Southeast Asia or the Middle East. As founder and CEO of Mugafi, Agarwal is leveraging AI to build what he calls “the world’s best fiction model” while simultaneously developing what could become the Marvel of the East — original franchises rooted in regional mythology that could become the tentpoles of tomorrow’s entertainment landscape.
“The base of any big movie, or any good movie, is the greatest story,” Agarwal tells Variety. “That’s what our team has been researching the last four years. Today, we have one of the amazing fiction models in the world, liked by more than 10,000 writers.”
The company’s name itself reflects its ambitious scope — “Mugafi” is derived from the first letters of music, games and film. Recently securing $3 million in funding led by StartupXseed and Proneur Network — with participation from Auxano, BeyondVP, MarsshotVC (Razorpay founders fund) and angels including Kunal Shah, Zubin Gandevia, Srishti Behl and Roshan Abbas — Mugafi operates as both a technology platform and IP creation engine.
Mugafi’s core product is Ved, an AI writing platform designed to function like “Canva for writing,” making storytelling more accessible to creators regardless of technical expertise. The platform claims to help writers complete scripts faster, check for plagiarism, ensure character and dialogue consistency, and analyze script quality.
“Our first goal is to reduce time and cost — if a writer or production house was making a movie for $100 million in two years, can we do it in three months and $10 million?” Agarwal says. “Second is to improve the predictability. This is a highly unpredictable market with just 2% success rate. Can we make this 5% or 10% over time by using AI and ML [machine learning]?”
Unlike some AI tools that generate complete content, Agarwal stresses that Ved functions as a “coach approach model” rather than replacing human creativity.
“The moment you start giving the hand to AI to write anything, you won’t be seeing any great stories because AI can’t write,” he says. “All AI is basically nothing but an output of data that we are feeding in. Getting originality out of it is still a little far.”
Instead, Mugafi aims to enhance writers’ capabilities, helping with research and operational aspects while keeping creative control firmly in human hands. “Our job is not to take out the writers from the ecosystem — writers are the most important part of the ecosystem — but to enhance their life, enhance their time and make them more operationally effective.”
The company claims more than 30,000 people have completed stories using their platform, with approximately 10,000 writers actively using it at any given time. Notable productions that have utilized Mugafi’s tools include Excel Entertainment’s “Fukrey 3,” for which Mugafi created “Choo CPT,” a quirky Chat GPT alternative based on the popular character Choocha from the franchise. They also developed “Dhadaam,” a boxing film for Stage, a Haryanvi dialect-based streaming platform. The Indian outpost of a U.S. studio major has developed two trilogies using Ved, details of which can’t be disclosed at the moment due to confidentiality agreements.
In parallel with its technology development, Mugafi is creating original franchises drawn from the cultural heritage of India, Southeast Asia and the MENA region.
“We are developing two universes,” Agarwal reveals. “One called ‘Moksh,’ the other called ‘Kali.’ ‘Moksh’ is largely inspired from Indian and Southeast Asian mythological characters. ‘Moksh’ is a magical universe, and Kali is a defense universe.”
The company has ambitious plans for these IPs, with Agarwal noting they’ve “laid around a plan of 1,600 comics” for “Moksh” alone. The first publications are expected by the end of the month.
Agarwal points to untapped potential in regional mythologies and stories, citing “Arabian Nights” as an example: “There are 1,001 stories, but what you know about largely is ‘Aladdin.’ What’s been made is just three stories out of them. So there is a large space of 998 which is still open.”
A serial entrepreneur who sold his first startup at 19, Agarwal draws inspiration from his modest upbringing in small towns in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, India. After losing his father at age 10, he spent considerable time in temples, developing a connection to mythology that now fuels Mugafi’s creative direction.
“The world has Marvel, out of which a lot of characters got inspired from India,” he says. “Why not India or Southeast Asia or MENA have their own Marvel?”
Prior to Mugafi, Agarwal founded Rutogo (a travel startup acquired by Ixigo), Cricnwin (a cricket gaming platform with over 10 million users) and Randomly Club (a social app that amassed over 100 million downloads). While these ventures achieved impressive metrics, Agarwal says Mugafi represents his most meaningful pursuit.
“I can’t work on something for a long time without having excitement for that,” he explains. “I have written all my past. Last 10 years, I’ve written more than 100 songs, written three to four stories, developed couple of universes on my own.”
With offices in India, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, Mugafi is strategically positioned across regions rich in untapped storytelling potential. The company is preparing to launch its tools in Arabic and expand to other languages within the next few months.
Agarwal also sees potential in Web3 technologies to transform entertainment industry economics. “People are now looking for a new asset class to invest in,” he notes. “Can someone come in and fill the space of letting you and me invest in the next Marvel or the next Avenger? Can we do some partnership with them? That’s where we see we’re going to crack it in the next one year and launch this space in Mugafi.”
As the company grows, Agarwal has allocated 10% of recent funding to research and development, establishing an R&D team with one of India’s prominent film schools, Whistling Woods. He likens AI development to sports: “80% accuracy comes within a few days. But then after that, to perfect that to 90-95-96-97% [is] gonna take years and years.”
Whether Mugafi succeeds in creating the next global entertainment franchise remains to be seen, but Agarwal is convinced the cultural goldmines of the East are ready to be transformed into tomorrow’s blockbuster universes – this time with AI as a co-pilot.
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