MitronTV, India’s TikTok alternative, raises ₹2 cr seed funding
2 min read . Updated: 01 Jul 2020, 09:31 PM IST
Premium- MitronTV also claims to have over 17 million downloads, within two months of its launch on the Play Store
- The investment comes just after the Indian government banned 59 Chinese apps, including ByteDance-owned TikTok
Bengaluru: Homegrown social video app MitronTV has raised ₹2 crore as a part of its seed round from venture capital firm 3one4 Capital as well as a LetsVenture syndicate led by Arun Tadanki.
The investment comes just after the Indian government banned 59 Chinese apps, including ByteDance-owned TikTok.
MitronTV plans to use the funds to accelerate its product development roadmap, engage more deeply with a wide network of Indian content creators, and hire talent to scale the tech infrastructure.
Founded by two computer science engineers, Shivank Agarwal and Ankit Khandelwal, Mitron app is a short-form social video app that allows users to create, upload, view, and share entertaining short videos, similar to China’s TikTok.
MitronTV also claims to have over 17 million downloads, within two months of its launch on the Play Store.
“We are a young company and we are hiring some of the best product and engineering talent to scale up Mitron rapidly. With the support of this round, our focus is on building features and supporting content that uniquely resonates with Indian users, while prioritising community standards and local laws in India," said Shivank Agarwal, founder and CEO of Mitron.
MitronTV also claims that its daily traffic jumped up by 11 times, ever since the Indian government announced a ban on several Chinese apps, on Tuesday. The company also said that the number of videos viewed on the platform increased sharply to cross 24 million video views per hour.
“We are excited to be working with the MitronTV team and grow a bottoms-up social video experience from India. We are deeply impressed by the team’s commitment to follow a zero-compromise approach when it comes to the privacy of their users and the principles of data sovereignty, integrity, and localisation," said Anurag Ramdasan, Head of Investments at 3one4 Capital.
“We spotted Mitron at a very early stage before anyone even heard of it and completed the round very rapidly. We have been working with founders from the pre-incorporation phase and we believe that the founding team is top notch with an ability to build a world-class product for Indian users," said Arun Tadanki, lead of the LetsVenture syndicate.
In the first week of June, MitronTV was pulled from the Google Play Store, for violating its ‘spam and minimum functionality' policy, where it was accused of copying content to provide the same experience as other apps.
It was also reported by the media that Mitron app was based on the same source code as Pakistani software company Qboxus’ TicTic app, which was purchased by the developers of MitronTV.
MitronTV isn’t alone in the exponential rise in traffic, after the government’s ban on Chinese apps.
Indian social media platform, ShareChat, earlier today said that the platform has recorded half a million downloads on an hourly basis, and over 15 million downloads since the ban was announced.
There are also other apps including Indian short video sharing platform Chingari which was witnessing more than 1 lakh downloads, every hour, according to its co-founder Sumit Ghosh.
