- On Wednesday, Homegrown short video-sharing platform Chingari said it has raised funding from Tinder’s Chief Product Officer Brian Norgard and OLX co-founder Fabrice Grinda.
On Wednesday, Homegrown short video-sharing platform Chingari said it has raised funding from Tinder’s Chief Product Officer Brian Norgard and OLX co-founder Fabrice Grinda.
The company hasn’t revealed the amount it raised. The announcement comes in a few weeks from it announcing the raising of $1.3 million (around Rs 10 crore) in a seed round led by AngelList India, iSeed of Utsav Somani, Village Global, LogX Ventures, and NowFloats’ Jasminder Singh Gulati.
Norgard has earlier invested, among others, in companies such as SpaceX, Lyft, and NotionHQ.
Likewise, Grinda has over 200 investments in many major companies around the world including Alibaba Group, Airbnb, Beepi, FanDuel, Palantir, and Windeln.
“We were impressed with the way that so far Chingari has evolved organically and in a very capital-efficient manner,” Grinda said.
The support comes after Chingari won the # AtmaNirbharApp Challenge, an Indian government-organized contest.
Talking to Next Big Brand, Biswatma Nayak (Co-founder, Chingari) said, “We are excited to be mentored by experienced leaders such as Grinda & Norgard and their vast knowledge will help us in growing”
“We will use this fund to strengthen our engineering team and we are hiring tirelessly. Apart from this we will focus on vernacular audience and creators, brining them onboard.”
Despite more than 25 million downloads, the desi app officials reported that the funds would be used primarily for product creation and recruiting a talented Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence engineering team to improve camera features.
Chingari lets its users download and upload videos, chat with friends, connect with new people, share content, search feeds, and more.
With WhatsApp status, images, audio clips, GIF stickers, and photos a Chingari user can get creative.
In addition to English and Hindi, the app can be used in many Indian languages such as Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, and others.
In recent months several new digital startups have drawn investors’ attention. Homegrown short-form video app Mitron revealed on Tuesday it’s raised $5 million (about Rs 37.3 crore) in a new funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners.
Lifestyle community trading platform Trell on Monday announced, among others, an $11.4 million (nearly Rs 86 crore) Series A round of funding led by KTB Network and Samsung Ventures.
