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AppsForBharat raises $10 mn in series A led by Elevation Capital
- The company will use the proceeds from the current round for creating content IPs, building the product, and hiring talent across the data and engineering verticals
AppsForBharat, a company focused on building apps to service the spiritual and devotional needs of Indian users, has raised $10 million as a part of its Series A funding round led by Elevation Capital, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital India, BEENEXT and Matrix Partners India.
The round also saw leading angels participating as a part of the round including Tiger Global’s Scott Schleifer; DST Global’s Saurabh Gupta; ShareChat founders, Ankush Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Pratap and iSeed’s Utsav Somani.
The company will use the proceeds from the current round for creating content IPs, building the product, and hiring talent across the data and engineering verticals. It plans to scale its team from 25 members to 60 by March 2022.
The current funding comes just four months after the company had secured $4 million in seed funding from Sequoia Capital India, BEENEXT, and WEH Ventures.
Founded last year, AppsForBharat is a product studio whose aim is to reimagine and digitise the experience of engaging in spirituality and devotion. The platform is focusing on bringing offline behaviours of -- praying daily, planning events using almanacs, and reading scriptures, mantras and horoscopes completely online, while creating a digital habit.
Moving forward, it will be launching multiple apps addressing different faiths and religions in India.
“We realised that hope and spirituality are elements which are core to the country. At present, the platform is working towards creating sustainable user behaviour and inducing trust amongst the users,” said Prashant Sachan, founder of AppsForBharat, who had previously co-founded community-based commerce platform Trell.
AppsForBharat’s first product, SriMandir aims to be the virtual destination for devotees to create their personalized shrines, consume devotional content, connect with prayer groups, and access a large library of spiritual texts, scriptures and videos.
For more in-depth engagement, users can participate in personalized pravachan (discourses) and virtual satsang, make offerings to temples, and even consult with astrologers and priests.
Within ten months of launch, Sri Mandir has clocked over a million installs and has half a million monthly active users, the company said.
It is also looking to launch community rooms for individuals to discuss spirituality and faith. The company will focus on monetisation streams on the platform, in the next three quarters.
In the next three years, AppsForBharat aims to reach close to 50-100 million users.
“Spirituality is a deep rooted part of India and how people connect about it is still largely an offline experience. Even on apps like Sharechat, spirituality is the top category. We realised that a lot of people are looking for spirituality platforms online and there is not one product catering to this need,” said Mayank Khanduja, partner, Elevation Capital.
Elevation Capital has already signed 23 term sheets in 2021 alone and will continue to back startups in the segments including enterprise software, content, gaming healthcare and edtech.
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First Published:2 Sep 2021, 09:42 PM IST
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