Faith-as-a-Service: How digital puja apps are transforming India’s spiritual market

Acharya Ashok Shastri chanted for six hours straight while the legal proceedings played out thousands of miles away. Speaking to Mint, Shastri claimed that though the case remains unresolved, his client told him later that he felt steadier through the ordeal. “Nothing untoward happened. Couldn’t have happened," insists Shastri.

The pandit’s services are in high demand, not because of any advertising but thanks to referrals from such clients: “One satisfied client refers to thousands of others," he says.

Shastri’s life sits at the intersection of two worlds. Born in Vrindavan and trained there in the traditions of scripture, he later completed an MBA. After a brief stint in accounting, he found purpose and a livelihood as a professional pandit. The 36-year-old Shastri knows the scriptures in and out but more importantly, he speaks the language of modern worship: via WhatsApp and short videos.

Shastri says he rarely opens his office in Ludhiana these days—it’s all work from home, mostly on the phone. Clients from England, Australia and the US text and video call to request his services, and he sometimes shares video clips with them of rituals performed on their behalf.

Like Shastri, many Hindu priests today perform rituals and share videos with worried clients within India and without.

These digital exchanges have now become a repeatable unit of commerce. They began as one-on-one exchanges of faith and proof and have now morphed into an online category of their own, thanks to platforms such as Sri Mandir, Vama and Utsav. These apps have built a business by packaging age-old rituals into digital experiences that can be streamed, tracked and trusted, facilitating millions of such moments each month.

Thanks to their efforts, a devotee in Delhi, Dubai or Denver can click his or her way into the spiritual realm by buying a puja, for instance, and receiving a video as proof.

By making spirituality accessible at the faithful’s fingertips for a fee, these ‘faithtechs’ have played a small but significant role in expanding the size of India’s religious and spiritual market to about $58.5 billion in 2024, according to data from Claight Corporation, a research firm.

Offline to online faith

Prashant Sachan, who built Sri Mandir as a broad faith platform from a clutch of free content apps, describes an early phase built around free offerings, including a digital shrine, devotional music, and panchang. “We didn’t think of the business model to begin with. We thought of the user first," he says.

Sachan, who earlier cofounded social commerce platform Trell and studied interaction design at IIT Bombay, points out that the behaviour his platform digitized for temples and rituals was already happening in the offline world, where people asked relatives or priests to perform rites on their behalf. The web was just a way to formalize and scale that behavior.

Today, Sri Mandir’s services include recorded pujas, live darshan, prasad fulfilment and curated merchandise. The platform now claims several million monthly users.

But the work isn’t purely digital. Teams go into temples and help priests learn how to record and fulfill requests. The real pioneering work, according to Sachan, has been less about flashy features and more about turning scattered and trust-based acts of devotion into repeatable and reliable processes that temples and devotees can depend on.

“Faith has always been a big part of Indian daily life. And has been a large spend category as well with about $40 billion being spent every year," says Mayank Khanduja, partner at VC firm Elevation Capital, an investor in Sri Mandir’s parent company, AppsForBharat.

In July 2025, Sri Mandir raised ₹175 crore in a Series C funding round led by Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital, with participation from existing investors Fundamentum, Elevation Capital and Peak XV Partners.

While Sri Mandir started by building a base of devotional content and organizing offline meetups across towns in North India to study user behaviour and explore monetization avenues, others in the space opted for a more direct route by onboarding temples and priests through livestreamed pujas and online ritual bookings to attract a user base.

Live streaming experiments

I get messages on my Facebook every day with so many people asking me to perform a puja for their family, to chant a name, to send proof," a temple priest told Sourajit Basu, co-founder of Utsav, which livestreams pujas.

Basu and his co-founders were still college students in Kolkata when they decided to test the idea during Durga Puja, Bengal’s biggest cultural festival, in 2020. They built an app that let hyperlocal pandals livestream their idol setups and rituals and allowed devotees from across India to participate online by having their names chanted or offerings made on their behalf.

“In the first month, roughly 20,000 people installed the app without any paid marketing," Basu says, recalling how the social media audience of each pandal helped them gain their first and accidental shot at scale.

The Durga Puja experiment helped the team realize that temples and priests had no structured way to handle the flood of digital requests. As more organizers and devotees came onboard, the idea evolved into a platform connecting temples and worshippers through livestreams and video proof. Eventually, it became a revenue-sharing model that gave temples a new source of income.

Devotees who can’t travel, elderly worshippers who can’t climb stairs and NRIs who miss home are the typical target audience for platforms such as Sri Mandir and Utsav. The work is equal parts tech product, trust building and old-fashioned relationship management.

“Last month, roughly 1.7 lakh people availed paid services on the platform," Sachan says, adding that Sri Mandir’s app has 4-5 million monthly users and that about 20-25% of demand comes from outside India.

According to the numbers shared by Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform, Sri Mandir’s mobile app clocked 2.4 million monthly users in September.

While Sri Mandir and Utsav have onboarded over 70 temples on their platform, Vama, cofounded by Manu Jain with Himanshu Semwal and Acharya Dev, a third-generation astrologer, claims to have onboarded around 250 temples across the country. It also claims to have facilitated more than 500,000 pujas with 100,000 monthly transacting users for services ranging from ritual bookings to astrology consultations to e-commerce.

While Sri Mandir has built tools and experiences that simplify how users access rituals, donations and temple services, Vama and Utsav see temples themselves as their key partners. Their focus lies in helping these institutions digitise rituals and manage online requests, more like a service provider.

“We’re very careful not to impose a one-size-fits-all approach," says cofounder Jain. “Our role is to facilitate, not dictate."

Sustaining temples and priests

To digitize a puja, faithtech platforms follow an ecommerce-like catalogue of temples and rituals, which can be booked and paid for through the app. Platforms that work in partnership with temple authorities often record the ritual and deliver a short video clip with a timestamp and the devotee’s name chanted as proof. Fulfilling these requests requires an elaborate chain of command to work in synchronicity.

Priests need to be trained to be comfortable with a phone camera, volunteers need to package prasad, hub managers need to coordinate dozens of temples and regional points of contact who solve last-mile problems.

“We provide comprehensive training on how to interact with users and conduct rituals in a way that’s camera-friendly without compromising the sanctity of the practice," says Vama’s Jain.

Sachan stresses that execution largely depends on the human side of things. “We travel three to four days a month to meet temple authorities and users. User research is core to our product," he says, acknowledging that while temple authorities have warmed up to the digital world, execution of these activities requires hand-holding and fostering relationships.

While the faithtech platforms offer access and continuity for devotees, they pitch reach and revenue to temples. Sachan says that there are many remote or neglected shrines that, when listed and detailed on Sri Mandir, suddenly found new devotees, incremental donations and even higher footfalls.

Utsav’s Basu describes a similar pattern where smaller and remote temples now receive a steady stream of online income that helps maintain shrines and sustain priests.

But unlike regular ecommerce cycles, digitizing faith also involves handling the emotional and cultural textures of religious rituals. A large part of the appeal of a Hindu ceremony lies in its physicality. The crackle of fire, and the rhythm of chanting are among the sensory elements creating a collective emotion of faith and trust, which can feel distant or diminished on a screen.

Founders of faithtech platforms acknowledge the challenges around reducing a ceremony into a commodity or preventing errors like mispronounced names or failed recordings.

“Trust is the biggest competition," Sachan says. “Temples and users often start from a position of mistrust." He says Sri Mandir copes with these through the operational rigour of manual onboarding, referral chains, refunds and over-communication when things go wrong.

Basu says Utsav delivers a video to 94% of devotees within 48 hours. The deliverable, which is often a video recorded or live streamed with the devotee’s name, is tricky but the most important metric to track for companies operating out of Bengaluru and New Delhi. Apart from incorrect pronunciation of the devotee’s name, the recording may be unable to capture the exact moment due to technical glitches.

The business side

India’s religious and spiritual market, which includes temples, pilgrimages, rituals and now a growing wave of digital-first faithtech platforms, has expanded steadily from an estimated $54 billion in 2022 to about $58.5 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach US $151.9 billion by 2034, according to Claight Corporation.

Depending on their focus areas, the business models of faithtech companies vary. Besides the primary revenue of digitized Puja and rituals, many of these companies have alternate streams of revenue through merchandise, such as rudraksh and bracelets, often fulfilled by temples.

Basu explains that temples share their expected costs upfront, including materials, priest fees and local expenses. Utsav adds a markup for operations, logistics and on-ground support. The final price is presented to devotees, who pay for the entire service, while the temple retains a share.

“It’s usually around a 20% margin for us," Basu says, adding that this varies depending on the temple, city and nature of the ritual. This model ensures that the temples don’t have to pay hefty infrastructure costs, devotees get access and proof, while the platform covers the cost of logistics and support.

Vama runs on a revenue-sharing model with its partner temples. The platform handles the backend, including technology, marketing, logistics and devotee engagement, while temples focus on conducting rituals. The company charges the temples a processing fee on each transaction. “Many of these temples had little to no digital infrastructure before partnering with us," said co-founder Jain.

Sri Mandir, which leads the market in terms of users, currently has paid ritual services as the dominant engine, with merchandise and prasad delivery growing as extensions.

Sachan says considering the nature of their work, the platform avoids blanket commissions or aggressive monetization strategies like a regular software business. Instead, it works with individual temples to understand their challenges, resources, priest availability and the kind of rituals they can fulfil.

While the app remains largely free, its paid services—premium add-ons within a broader devotional experience—are accessed by about 170,000 devotees out of 4-5 million monthly users, says Sachan.

This balance of free content also acts as a funnel to paid ritual experiences, which is crucial in a market that is vast but uneven. Adoption is higher in tier-I cities and among age groups who find travel difficult, says Sachan.

The founders of these faithtech platforms insist that their goal is to complement and not replace in-person worship. “This is the second-best option" says Basu, “When people can’t go to a temple, a platform gives continuity. It should not and cannot substitute the experience of being at the shrine."

For now, the founders are knee-deep in solving on-ground execution: onboarding priests who need digital training, figuring out regional pronunciation of names, ensuring video quality, building logistics for prasad, and structuring trust mechanisms so a temple in a remote village can reliably serve a devotee in New Zealand.

By far the hardest challenge is trying to ensure technology can preserve the sanctity of a ritual, while scaling access.

“It’s a hard problem," Sachan admits. “It requires consistency and hard work. Execution is the key."