Short-video app Mitron raises $5 million in Series A funding

The new round of financing saw participation from Indian startup founders including - Deep Kalra, chairman, MakeMyTrip Ltd., Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs; Jiten Gupta, founder, Jupiter; Amarjit Batra, managing director, Spotify India, Radhika Ghai, co-founder, Shopclues, Vikalp Sahni, co-founder and ex-CTO at GoIbibo, amongst others. TK Kurien, managing partner, Premji Invest, Manish Vij and Harish Bahl of Smile Group also participated in their individual capacity.

According to the company, the latest round of funding will be used by the startup to accelerate its product development, ramp up its indigenous creator tool as well as hire high quality talent. The company also plans to onboard a wide network of Indian content creators on the app and invest in building Mitron brand.

Founded by two computer science engineers, Shivank Agarwal and Anish 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.

Now, according to founder and CEO, Shivank Agarwal, Mitron is trying to focus on content, and attract creators to showcase their talent and skill sets through activities of dancing, singing or even painting.

According to Mitron, which was launched in April, this year, it has 33 million downloads on the Google Play Store, and is looking to launch on the iOS app store. The app claims to have 18 million monthly active users, at present. Of this user base, 15% are content creators.

Mitron counts active users as individuals who have watched more than a video on its platform. The company also added that it had achieved the 10 million download milestone even before India's ban on Chinese apps. Further, 50% of Mitron’s users are Tier 2 and 3 geographies.

“We have been focussing considerably on the content side, while allowing users to showcase their talents and giving creators a platform. Along with this we want creators to build out their careers through Mitron, and are providing extensive feedback on the existing videos they create," said Agarwal.

Agarwal also added that along with providing feedback, Mitron is also building a high-performance creator tool, which will help creators not just refine their videos, but also reduce dependency on commercial tools.

At present, Mitron receives 9 billion video views per month, and witnesses more than 50% of its traffic from Tier 2 and 3 geographies.

"We have been tracking Mitron for 3 months and loved the way they have evolved their thinking around content creation, community management and video delivery. We believe eventually the best product with long term thinking will win. Focus is to create a high engagement and high retention community. Then only you can be long term partners for creators," said Pratik Poddar, principal at Nexus Venture Partners.

Recently, Mitron’s competitor Chingari, received seed funding of $1.3 million from AngelList, LogX Ventures, iSeed, Village Global and some others, earlier this month. Even Indian social app player, Sharechat launched its short-video app, Moj, two days after the Chinese-app ban and currently has 2.8 million users and is reportedly creating about 2.5 lakh new videos every day.

Earlier, Mint reported that Sharechat was in early-stage talks with technology conglomerate Microsoft for a possible investment of $100 million.