Deal focus: India’s AppsForBharat inspires VC devotees

Indian spirituality platform AppsForBharat understands that semantics are important in marketing and is careful not to use the word “religion” in any of its promotional materials. Everyone knows you don’t need technology to practice religion. But when it comes to connecting with one’s self and finding inner fulfillment – that’s app territory.

Still, religion is at the heart of the offering. The idea is to create a multi-app platform, with separate services for each faith, and in some cases, multiple apps per faith focusing on specific rituals. The main value proposition is in the aggregation of trustworthy references on subjects that are especially prone to misinformation; festival calendars, scripture, the gods themselves.

The first product is called Sri Mandir, which facilitates daily worship of more than 30 popular Hindu gods and goddesses via tools such as a spiritual calendar, a horoscope service, a mobile shrine creator, and audio feeds for music, stories, and mantras. Much attention was put into making a smooth user interface, so as not to jar moods of tranquility. Eight months after launch, it has been downloaded about one million times.

Elevation Capital led a $10 million Series A round for the company this week with participation from Sequoia Capital India, Beenext, and Matrix Partners India. It follows a $4 million seed round last month from Sequoia, Beenext, and WEH Ventures. Not coincidentally, Sequoia and Beenext are investors in Trell, a social commerce app set up by Prashant Sachan, founder of AppsForBharat. Sachan left Trell last year to focus full-time on his new project.

“It’s been ten years of mobile internet in India, but we haven’t seen a lot of success and user retention in this space [spirituality],” says Sachan. “People have approached it with a transactional mindset and tried to create new user behaviors. But this is a category where behaviors are hundreds of years old. Most developers have tried to monetize trust before they established it. Their approach was not very purist when it came to serving the needs of the users.”

AppsForBharat will follow an affordable freemium revenue model, whereby the core services will be free-to-use and some social options will require a small fee of no more than $10 a year. The idea is to become economic through sheer market dominance. Sachan expects to benefit from barriers to entry related to content aggregation and reliability of information while creating a moat by being a first-mover in community building and brand recognition.

“If you are going into this tricky category and taking people for a ride, they will not like it. We’re trying to make people feel elated – there will be no ads, and we won’t give any opinions. All the information is pulled from the purest sources,” Sachan says. “We are well-positioned because we have years of research and understanding of this category and spent a lot of time analyzing what worked and didn’t work for other apps. We had a massive book of learning when we launched.”

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Consumer
• Media
• Early-stage
• India
• Sequoia Capital
• Matrix Partners
• Beenext Capital Management
• TMT