Bengaluru: India’s growing faith-tech startups are moving beyond digital horoscopes and virtual rituals to claim the nation’s $35 billion market for spiritual merchandise. So, the firms that once focused solely on software are now wrestling with the complexities of supply chains, selling everything from ‘blessed’ crystals to sacred beads.
The pivot toward e-commerce is a move for higher margins and stronger customer loyalty. By enabling the shipment of goods, platforms like Astrotalk, Vama and Srimandir are transforming occasional service consultations into daily habits, creating touchpoints in a fragmented industry.
Yet, the transition has operational risks. Founders are navigating a huge, unorganized network of vendors where quality is an issue and claims of fakes are commonplace. To scale, these digital natives must now master warehousing and robust quality control.
At Elev8 Venture Partners-backed Astrotalk, the commerce vertical now processes up to 15,000 orders a day, Astrotalk Store’s chief business officer Daman Soni told Mint. At Wavemaker Partners-backed Vama, products already contribute 35% of revenue within months of launch and are expected to overtake services soon, according to Manu Jain, co-founder, VAMA.app.
The shift is unfolding within a massive and still largely untapped market. India’s faith and religious products segment alone is already worth over $35 billion and remains ripe for digital disruption, according to a 2024 Redseer report.
For Astrotalk, the move began as an experiment. “This was a startup within a startup,” said Soni, describing how a small internal effort evolved into a scaled operation with warehousing, sourcing and packaging capabilities.
Vama, which started as a services platform, has rapidly built out its commerce vertical as part of a broader ambition to expand user expenditure and engagement. “Vama started as a pure services company. But today we operate across temple services, astrology, and e-commerce,” Jain added.
Retention play
At Srimandir, the approach is more measured. Founder and chief execuitve officer (CEO) Prashant Sachan said commerce is being built around user demand rather than as a standalone revenue push.
As competition intensifies and user engagement becomes harder to sustain, faith-tech firms are expanding into product offerings to create more frequent touchpoints and unlock new revenue streams.
Some of their vendors are local businesses in each region, while the firms have catalogues co-curated with well-known holy places like the Rinmukteshwar Mahadev temple in Ujjain. Still other items on the catalogue are manufactured in-house.
The move into commerce is part of a larger retention strategy. Services in the faith-tech ecosystem are use-case-specific, with users consulting astrologers or booking rituals at specific moments. Products, on the other hand, create continuity.
These firms have set up websites with blog posts and social media content on how to pick the right idol or pooja kit, how to clean and care for idols, and more.
Astrotalk is already seeing the effect. The company’s repeat rate in its products business is 28%, driven by users returning to buy items for family members after initial purchases, according to Soni. The company now processes thousands of orders daily, working with over 50 vendors across India while investing heavily in content to explain how products should be used.
Astrotalk’s FY25 revenue surged 85% year-on-year to ₹1,215 crore, and AppsForBharat's FY25 operating revenue touched ₹70 crore while net loss widened to ₹45 crore in the same year.
Vama’s strategy is more differentiated. Rather than competing in commoditised categories like rudraksha, it focuses on temple-linked products co-created with priests and institutions. “We are focusing on selling products that are co-curated with renowned temples to create trust and familiarity,” Jain said, positioning authenticity as its core advantage.
Cost of scale
The bet is already showing results. Products, launched just months ago, contribute 35% of Vama’s revenue and have the potential to overtake the services business in the next three months, Jain said.
Srimandir, however, is taking a longer view. With a deeply engaged user base, the company is testing demand rather than rushing to scale. Sachan sees the broader trend as inevitable but cautions against over-indexing on it.
“People are chasing wherever the next set of opportunities is,” Sachan said, framing commerce as just one part of a larger devotional ecosystem.
While commerce promises growth, trust and authenticity remain challenging.
India’s spiritual products market remains deeply fragmented and largely unorganized. “Overall, online astrology is yet another sunrise sector that is a highly fragmented and unorganized market. While the outlook remains promising for players in the segment, with existing monetization and expansion avenues, the growth for players not innovating and solving for Bharat is likely to plateau,” Mukesh Kumar, associate partner at Redseer, said in the report.
Astrotalk, for instance, had to build its supply chain from scratch, working with dozens of vendors across regions and helping them scale to meet demand.
“The whole segment is practically unorganised,” Soni said, highlighting the difficulty of standardising quality at scale.
Trust is an even bigger hurdle. In a category where belief is central, consumers are often sceptical about whether products are genuine. Moreover, at an industry level, efforts are underway to tighten standards.
Countering fakes
Astrology-led gemstone sales, for example, are difficult to regulate, even as price disparities raise concerns among consumers. “It is very difficult to regulate them. It is a very unorganized business,” Kirit Bansali, chairman of Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC), told Mint, adding that products sold in this space are not necessarily fake but often lower in quality and therefore cheaper. “It’s not fake. It’s cheaper, you can say,” he noted, attributing the wide variation in pricing to diverse sourcing geographies, including Africa, Myanmar and India.
Sabyasachi Ray, executive director of GJEPC, said the industry is moving towards stricter certification standards, with verification required at multiple levels. Unreliable and unaccredited certifications remain a key concern, undermining market trust, Ray noted.
Some companies are prioritising authenticity over scale. Srimandir is building a supply chain anchored in verified sources and temple partnerships, even if it slows growth. “Quality cannot be compromised, and hence we won’t play the price war,” Sachan said.
Vama, meanwhile, avoids mass-market categories altogether, focusing exclusively on temple-blessed or co-curated products to maintain credibility.