Chingari bags seeds round from AngelList

The alternative for TikTok; Chingari was launched in 2018 under the incubation of IT consulting company Globussoft .The short video app has recorded more than 23 mn downloads since the Chinese app ban in June.

The app was created by two developers Biswatma Nayak and Siddharth Gautam and other team members of Globussoft which included Ghosh. Following the exponential rise of the user base due to TikTok Ban, the platform decided to register two separate entities - Tech4Billion Pvt Ltd and Chingari Media Pvt Ltd.

According to the sources, Chingari was also in talks with venture capital firm Tiger Global for this round, but the deal fell through. Chingari's cofounder Sumit Ghosh and AngelList's partner Utsav Somani declined to comment on the development.

Chingari and other apps in the short video space have has seen exponential growth since the government banned 59 Chinese apps including short video platforms TikTok, Likee and Vigo. With all these major players in the hyper shots segment out of India, there was a large void in the market which Chingari and other competitors are looking to fulfill.

In a recent interaction, Ghosh indicated just how fast the app was growing. "Right after the ban announcement, the platform experienced 500K - 600K new downloads for the whole next day. The servers started cracking, the backend infra was going crazy, we had to shut a lot of APIs down," he said.

Chingari has recorded more than 23 Mn downloads in the month since the ban. Adding TikTok-like creation tools except AR filters, which are currently in the works, has been a key factor in this success. Chingari's UI also mimics TikTok to the extent that even the arrangement of icons and the profile UI are the same. But Ghosh makes no bones about the fact that Chingari is the direct Indian alternative to TikTok.

The company competes with another short video platform Mitron, ShareChat's Moj, Trell, TikTok's Josh, Roposo, Gaana's HotShots, and Zee5's yet-to-be-launched HiPi. Mitron is more like a direct competitor as it should focus on short video segments and poses as an Indian alternative to TikTok for Tier 2 and beyond users.