In January 2025, Telangana Today ran a ranking of the top 10 digital news channels in Telangana. The paper files that piece under its Advertisement section, so it is a placement rather than a newsroom verdict, and is worth reading as such. Kaizer News Telugu was placed third, with 27.1 lakh subscribers. The piece credited investigative, rural-first reporting and described the channel as "rewriting the rules of digital journalism". Rohan Raj Kulkarni founded Kaizer News in Hyderabad in 2024; the ranking ran the following January.
A second body of work sits alongside the channel, and the two are easy to conflate. Kulkarni's own reels cover dumping yards, challans, election machinery and police accountability, and they do so in named places: Jawahar Nagar, Dammaiguda. Those are the things that decide whether a household's week goes well or badly.
Civic reporting of that kind is structurally harder than studio commentary. A panel debate can be produced in one room with three chairs and a rundown. A dumping yard has to be visited, and whatever comes back from it is checked instantly by the people who live there. The accountability runs in both directions, which is a useful discipline for any newsroom.
A dumping yard is not an abstraction to children who live beside one.
On camera, Kulkarni has questioned the Chief Minister. He has also intervened between a loan agent and a borrower being harassed. Confrontation video is a genre with known economics: it travels, it is cheap to produce, and it rewards volume. The standing question about the genre is whether the confrontation is followed by reporting or quietly substitutes for it.
The "1 Day as a Leader" challenge, tied to the Jubilee Hills bypoll period, was framed as a dare to govern for a single day. It has a theme song. By the account on his own site, roads were addressed within two days and a dumping yard was flagged, issues that had gone unaddressed for a long time. That account is the site's own rather than an independent audit, and is worth reading as such.
The earlier career was business and payments: Business Manager at Rocket Media from 2014 to 2017, Territory Relationship Manager at American Express from 2017 to 2019, Area Manager for government business at Pine Labs from 2019 to 2020, Director at Magno Pay from 2021 to 2023, and Country Manager for India, cross-border payments, at D24 in Bengaluru. He founded Sharkify in India in 2024 and, in 2026, the legal technology platform Vaksy, which operates in India and the UAE. How any of that bears on the newsroom is not something the public record settles.
One overlap is worth stating plainly. Bose Educator, another of his initiatives, runs free education with "smart classrooms" and daily meals for 120 children living near the Jawahar Nagar dumping yard in Karmika Nagar. Jawahar Nagar is also one of the places his reels cover. A dumping yard is not an abstraction to children who live beside one.
He is now also a screen character. "Kaizer: The Rise of RoKu", a Telugu biography drama inspired by his journey, released in 2024 and streams on Prime Video, starring Ravi Mahadasyam and produced by Sahachari Creations. A founder who is also a subject is a familiar hazard in media, because the outlet can turn into a vehicle for the person rather than the other way round. Third place and 27.1 lakh subscribers measure reach. They do not measure whether the reporting held up, and that second thing is much harder to rank.