Short-video platform Chingari raises about Rs 110 crore in Series A extension funding led by Republic Capital

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Short-video platform Chingari announced it had raised $15 million (Rs 111 crore) in a Series A extension round led by Republic Capital and joined by investors such as OnMobile, JPIN Venture Catalysts, Hill Harbour, Angellist, Venture Collective, and family offices.

The funding values the company at $85 million (Rs 631 crore).

Majority of the investment will go into technology, launching new features and hiring artificial intelligence experts for enhancing user experience. 

The new features including live-streaming, social commerce and audio chat will help creators to boost their engagement rates and open up branding collaborations, Chingari said in a statement.

The company will also be investing in marketing initiatives to strengthen the brand’s reach in Tier-III and IV markets. It will focus on attracting talented creators to generate engaging content for viewers in their local languages, which the company is expanding to 20.

Sumit Ghosh, co-founder and CEO of Chingari, said, “This new funding will further strengthen our position and help us deliver an immersive user experience for our community. We are concentrating our technology and marketing efforts to achieve this goal.”

The company is looking at growing its user base to over 200 million by the end of 2022 and currently has 110 million downloads and 35 monthly active users.

The firm raised $19 million in October 2021 from investors to launch crypto token $GARI in November 2021 for public sale. 

Talking about the company’s shift to crypto, Ghosh shared in an earlier interaction that to survive and monetise, Chingari had to diversify and fast since being just a TikTok clone would not be sustainable.

Chingari was founded by Ghosh, Biswatma Nayak and Deepak Salvi in 2018, amid the TikTok boom in the country. The ban on TikTok two years later gave the company a much-needed fillip as downloads exploded from 5.7 million before the ban in June 2020 to 23.6 million a year later. The company so far has 110 million downloads and 35 million monthly active users on its platform.

“You can’t build a copy (of TikTok) and compete. Instagram will come and crush you. You have to innovate, you have to build something uniquely different and be better than what is already out there. The Moj and Josh of the world may not have realised it, but they are or have already lost the race,” Ghosh said. 

“That's what led us to build it ($GARI). This is something that none of the other Indian competitors have done so far. Crypto is the necessary edge over other players, including Instagram.”