Trio of Indian short video apps raises funding
Indian short video apps Chingari, Mitron and Trell have all received venture capital backing as they look to slowly fill a void left by the suspension of ByteDance-owned TikTok’s operations in the country.
Chingari, which, like TikTok, focuses on short-form entertainment, raised $1.2 million in seed funding last week. Backers included AngelList India, iSeed, Village Global, and LogX Ventures.
Meanwhile, Mitron and Trell have raised $5 million and $11.4 million respectively. Nexus Venture Partners led the fundraise for Mitron, an app launched in April that seeks to host user-generated and branded content related to education, news and entertainment.
Trell is a lifestyle-focused video platform that previously operated as a blogging community when it launched in 2017. Investors include KTB Network, Samsung Ventures, Firebolt Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Fosun RZ Capital.
Chingari says it has more than three million active daily users, while Trell counts more than 25 million monthly users, and Mitron claims more than 18 million monthly users. Trell plans to launch a social commerce platform in the coming months as well. Content creators usually use the Trell platform to issue reccommendations for various lifestyle products and services in local Indian languages.
All three apps have received a boost in usage since the Indian government banned 59 apps with links to Chinese entities in June citing national security concerns. Several more apps were banned a short while later.
The move occurred after a border skirmish earlier in the month that led to casualties on both sides and stoked anti-China sentiment in the country. The initial ban led to the suspension of TikTok’s India operations. At its peak, TikTok had more than 119 millon active daily users in the country.
TikTok's plans for India are unclear, although it is in talks with Microsoft to sell its operations in select markets outside India including the US. Indian media reports indicate that Reliance Industries, the oil-to-retail parent of telcom and digital media firm Jio Platforms, is in talks with ByteDance to acquire TikTok’s Indian operations.
Several other Indian start-ups have launched social video platforms, including local language platform ShareChat and news aggregator Dailyhunt. Facebook-owned Instagram has also launched Reels, an in-app feature where users can create short-form videos.
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