Chingari’s Clubhouse clone FireSide to shut down; live audio to be integrated with parent app by January 2022

The Chingari logo. As per the company's whitepaper, its $GARI token is built on top of a digitally autonomous organization, which is governed by token holders. (Image: Papiya Debnath via Wikimedia Commons 4.0)

Clubhouse clone FireSide, launched in May this year, will be shut and its live audio feature will be integrated with parent app Chingari by January 2022, a top executive told Moneycontrol.

The move comes at a time when the company has shifted its focus to crypto and Web 3.0 with the launch of GARI tokens, even as its larger rival Clubhouse is seeing a steep decline in the number of users.

Also Read: Chingari's $19 Million Crypto Bet And What It Means 

“At this point, running two different entities does not make sense. We started FireSide because we realised that internet audio has a future. So, when we launched FireSide, it was just an experiment to build the technology,” said Sumit Ghosh, co-founder & CEO of Chingari.

When the company first launched the platform, Ghosh said that he saw how well Twitter had integrated its live audio, Spaces, within the platform. This was at a time when Clubhouse was already seeing huge traction.

However, months since the launch, while it has active rooms, downloads have remained flat. In a press release a week after the launch, the company had said that within a week, the app had seen 100,000 downloads.

To be sure, Chingari was not the only company that was replicating the live audio feature that Clubhouse had popularised. US tech companies such as Facebook, Spotify, and Twitter have also integrated live audio features into their app.

In India, microblogging platform Koo said in June that it is working on its own social audio feature, which will be launched in a month. However, in a recent interaction with Moneycontrol, Koo co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna said that the company is in the process of building the feature but did not give a timeline for the same.

Integrating FireSide with Chingari

Now, Chingari is integrating FireSide with its short video platform. Ghosh says that there are overlaps in the user base. “We just thought that running two separate entities and products does not make sense, especially when the user base is overlapping. We are integrating into one single Chingari audio room that will be available within the short video app. If you look at Douyin (Tiktok) in China, they have done the same thing,” he said.

With the integration, the company expects more users to utilise audio rooms on the platform for conversations.

Chingari's IDO

Chingari, the parent app that was launched in 2018, is going for an Initial Dex Offering (IDO) for its token GARI. IDO is a crowdfunding platform, where a new project launches a coin or token on the decentralised exchange. The company is planning to raise $16 million through IDO, which opens on December 15 and closes on December 18.

Last month, the company raised $19.84 million via a public sale of GARI tokens from close to 5,000 investors. Earlier in October, it raised $19 million from a clutch of 30 venture funds and investors for its crypto bet. Chingari currently has 85 million downloads and 35 million monthly active users.

The company is also on a hiring spree. Chingari recently appointed a Chief Technology Officer and is ramping up its engineering recruitment. The company currently has 60 employees, 25 of them in engineering. It is looking to double the engineering headcount to 50. Chingari is also giving away crypto tokens — as many as 200 SOLs (Solana tokens) — for referrals.

The company is also building an NFT (non-fungible token) marketplace and is looking to expand to overseas locations such as Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries.