2025-08-15. Launched five years ago by Hindustan Times, HT Labs now has a staff of more than 160 and has developed a stable of successful products. Co-Founder and CEO Avinash Mudaliar recently discussed what they do and how they decide which projects to work on. The post How India’s HT Labs turns experiments into profitable products appeared first on WAN-IFRA.
Labs can play a crucial role in the media landscape by offering a safe space to test, experiment, and take risks. HT Labs – Hindustan Times’ digital innovation hub – is driving product development across content, technology, and consumer experiences.
Since its launch in 2020, it has rolled out several successful platforms including OTTplay for movie and TV fans, Slurrp for foodies and home chefs, HT School for students, Mint Genie for beginning investors, and Upublish for content creators.
“It’s a proof of concept, and only if it works, do you scale. The entire concept is about failing, and failing fast,” Avinash Mudaliar, the Co-Founder and CEO of HT Labs, told participants at our Digital Media India event this summer.
Essentially, labs within news publishing companies can provide the larger publishing house with start-up style benefits in terms of experimenting, testing and developing, Mudaliar said.
Bridging today and the future
Mudaliar described HT Labs as “a bridge between today’s core operations and tomorrow’s bets,” experimenting with new technologies, formats and business models to move beyond legacy content ecosystems.
WAN-IFRA Members can watch Avinsah Mudaliar’s presentation
on our Knowledge Hub by clicking here.
Its 160-plus staff, supported by more than 100 additional external collaborators, work entirely remotely from across India. This has provided Mudaliar with some unique insights.
Those who thrive in this environment, he said, are “entrepreneurs by DNA” – people comfortable with risk, product building, and innovation in areas like UI, UX and AI.
All HT Labs staff work from home, and from numerous places within India, he said.
Hindustan Times reaches tens of millions of people every day through a variety of platforms.
Symbiotic relationship offers a win-win
Publisher owned media labs, such as HT Labs, also benefit from the controlled systems already in place within the publishing house.
For example, when HT Labs develops a product that can be scaled, the finance, HR and other commercial aspects can all be handled by various departments within the Hindustan Times, Mudaliar said.
“These systems already have these people, so it’s a plug-and-play. We bring in our product-business expertise, they bring in their expertise of the past 100 years,” he said.
That 100 years is literal in the case of Hindustan Times, which is celebrating its centennial anniversary this year, he noted.
Beyond developing and launching their own new products, HT Labs also builds and runs products, such as websites and newsletters, on a commission basis for other publishers, Mudaliar said.
“The most important thing of all about HT Labs is that we can be very agile. We can ship a product in 24 hours,” he said.
Some products that Hindustan Times has developed to celebrate their 100 anniversary this year.
Solving for today and tomorrow, or shooting for the moon
Mudaliar said HT Labs has two main ways of deciding which experiments to bet on.
The first, which he called Track 1, is based on solving problems for today.
“CMS automation, SEO enrichment, AI-driven content tagging. These are current problems that I think every newsroom goes through,” Mudaliar said.
The second, or Track 2, is where you build for tomorrow.
“You have a team that builds on Web 3. You have a team that is experimenting 24/7 on voice interfaces. And you have a team that can build on the next economy, which is called the creator economy, it’s already present, and regional personalisation. Regional personalisation is a tough problem to crack.”
Next, is prioritising.
For HT Labs, that means aligning with macro trends, such as AI, the creator economy and vernacular content.
They also use a process called Horizon 1-2-3. Horizon 1 and 2 are similar to Track 1 and 2. You are solving for today (Horizon 1) and for the short term, say six months (Horizon 2).
Horizon 3, is very different, and it’s the important one, Mudaliar said. “What are your moonshots? What are you literally going to experiment on, without any expectations, where you know you are going to fail, but you are going to end up learning something?”
HT Labs has been successfully navigating these areas with proof not only from their product launches but also in other tangible ways, such as patents.
“We’ve got close to 21 patents in the past five years. We have a lot of individuals in the organisation, and it’s kudos to their technical and product skills. When you get a patent – both in the Indian system and internationally – it clearly says you are building something different,” Mudaliar said.
HT Labs also works with many major brands, such as Diageo and Mondelez, for their digital and mobile sites in India.
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