Homegrown short video-sharing platform Chingari has raised an undisclosed amount of additional funds from Brian Norgard, the Chief Product Officer of Tinder, and leading French entrepreneur Fabrice Grinda, Founder of OLX.
The announcement comes weeks after Chingari raised $1.3 million (around Rs 10 crore) in a seed round led by AngelList India, Utsav Somanis iSeed, Village Global, LogX Ventures, and others.
“We are humbled that globally acclaimed entrepreneurs like Brian Norgard and Fabrice Grinda loved the vision of the Chingari team and invested into what we are building,” Sumit Ghosh, Co-founder and CEO of Chingari App said on Wednesday.
Norgard has earlier invested in startups like SpaceX, Lyft, and NotionHQ, and others. Whereas, Grinda has more than 200 investments in several big firms including Alibaba Group, Airbnb, Beepi, FanDuel, Palantir, and Windeln.
Speaking about the investment Grinda said, “We’ve been impressed with the way Chingari has grown organically and in a very capital efficient manner so far. Chingari has been able to make its way into the hearts of the Indian people and the team is shipping upgrades at the speed like none we have seen so far.”
With more than 25 million downloads already, Chingari is India’s answer to banned Chinese-owned TikTok app. The founders of Chingari said that the received funds will be utilised mostly on product development and hiring a talented engineering team of Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence to enhance the camera features.
Chingari allows its users to download and upload videos, chat with friends, interact with new people, share content, browse through feed, and much more. A Chingari user can get creative with WhatsApp status, videos, audio clips, GIF stickers, and photos.
Besides English and Hindi, the app can be used in multiple Indian languages like Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu.
Several new digital startups have attracted the attention of investors in the recent months. Homegrown short-form video app Mitron on Tuesday announced it had raised $5 million (approximately Rs 37.3 crore) led by Nexus Venture Partners in a new funding round
Similarly, lifestyle community commerce platform Trell on Monday announced a $11.4 million (nearly Rs 86 crore) Series A round funding led by KTB Network and Samsung Ventures, among others.