According to two people familiar with the situation, Tech4Billion Media is planning to raise $200 million at a $1 billion valuation, catapulting the operator of video-sharing platform Chingari into India’s fast-growing league of so-called startup unicorns. As per the persons mentioned above, the company has already received commitments worth at least $100 million. Unicorns are companies with a market capitalization of at least $1 billion.
The platform, which says to be one of India’s speediest short-video apps, is in talks with many local and overseas venture capital companies and crypto-focused funds for the fundraising, the people cited above said. The investment round is expected to close in about two months. Last year, the Indian startup sector saw a spike in investment and valuations, with 42 brands becoming unicorns. The trend continued in the first quarter of 2022, with 14 companies, including DealShare, Polygon, and Games 24×7, becoming unicorns.
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Chingari raised an additional $15 million in a Series A investment headed by Republic Capital in January. The firm raised Rs 95 crore in a Series A financing led by OnMobile Global in April 2021. Chingari, founded in November 2018 by Sumit Ghosh, Deepak Salvi, Aditya Kothari, and Biswatma Nayak, allows users to download and publish short movies and purchase for purchase products within the app. Chingari denied commenting anything till press time.
The Chingari platform has over 130 million users in India and offers videos in more than 15 languages. Short video app Chingari offers real-time video commerce, in which every video uploaded to the site is processed frame by frame, and all identified objects are matched against Amazon’s live inventory. Users can shop through the app as a result of this. In addition, Chingari also delivers features such as Chingari Multiplex and Chingari TV to raise the entertainment quotient further.
However, Chingari’s move to present India’s first crypto-token, GARI, mainly at a time of heightened curiosity for web3 companies, is drawing a lot of eyeballs for the startup. The $GARI token is constructed on the Solana blockchain network, an up-and-coming cryptocurrency usually noticed as a contender to Ethereum.
Last November, GARI raised $40 million in just 24 hours after going live on the Republic platform. Republic is a crowd-equity platform specializing in startups, real estate, gaming, and cryptocurrency investments. The crypto-token had raised $19 million from 30 venture funds and individual investors a month prior. A token round was used to raise funds. In a token round, investors invest in a firm by purchasing the project’s tokens, which in this case are $GARI. GARI is currently traded on CoinDCX, HUObi, and MEXC Global, among other leading global centralized exchanges. GARI is presently available on the Chingari app, and producers may start earning $GARI Social Tokens by uploading videos.
Last year, investor interest in Web3 and cryptocurrency agreements surged, and this year is projected to be no different, especially now that the government has ruled on the legality of digital assets. Several new business models evolved in this arena, including decentralized finance (DeFi), which is an open-source movement; cryptocurrencies; and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are used in early-stage agreements.
