[Funding alert] Chingari picks up funding from Tinder CPO, OLX founder, and tech entrepreneur Guy Lelouch

Homegrown social app Chingari, a short video sharing platform to cater to the needs of young Bharat, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Brian Norgard, the Chief Product Officer of Tinder; French entrepreneur Fabrice Grinda, Founder of OLX; and tech entrepreneur Guy Lelouch.

A respected and savvy investor, Brian has earlier invested in startups like SpaceX, Lyft, and NotionHQ, among others. Similarly, Fabrice, hailed among founders as a super angel investor, has more than 200 investments in several big firms around the world, including Alibaba Group, Airbnb, Beepi, FanDuel, Palantir, and Windeln.

Sumit Ghosh, Co-founder and CEO of Chingari app, said, 

“We are humbled that globally acclaimed entrepreneurs like Brian Norgard and Fabrice Grinda loved the vision of the Chingari team and invested in what we are building. We are absolutely delighted to have them onboard the Chingari rocket ship and look forward to learning from them the art of building and scaling global product companies.”

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Fabrice Grinda added, “We’ve been impressed with the way Chingari has grown organically and in a very capital-efficient manner so far. Chingari has been able to make its way into the hearts of the Indian people and the team is shipping upgrades at the speed like none we have seen so far. We are incredibly excited to partner with the team at Chingari.”

The funding comes just a few days after Chingari won the #AtmaNirbharApp Challenge, the first-of-its-kind contest organised by the Government of India. Chingari was voted as the best app in the social media category. 

The officials of the desi app, with more than 25 million downloads, have stated that the funds will be used mostly for product development and hiring a talented team of ML/AI engineers to enhance the camera features.

Chingari allows its users to download and upload videos, chat with friends, interact with new people, share content, browse through feed, and much more. A Chingari user can get creative with WhatsApp status, Videos, Audio clips, GIF stickers, and photos, and become popular. The platform gives points (on per-view basis) to its content creators and these points can be redeemed for money, making the platform truly rewarding.

Chingari — available in multiple Indian languages like English, Hindi, Bangla, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu — can be downloaded for free on all app stores such as Google Play Store and iOS App Store.

This month, the app has also raised a funding of $1.3 million in a seed round led by venture capitalists, including AngelList India, Utsav Somani's iSeed, Village Global, LogX Ventures, and Jasminder Singh Gulati of NowFloats.

(Edited by Teja Lele Desai)