AppsForBharat raises $10 million from Elevation Capital, others

Angel investors, including Tiger Global’s Scott Shleifer, DST Global’s Saurabh Gupta and Meesho’s cofounders Vidit Aatrey and Cred’s founder Kunal Shah also pitched in.

The company will use the funds to create content intellectual property, build the product and hire talent across the product, data, and engineering verticals.

Prashant Sachan, cofounder of influencer-led social commerce platform Trell, incubated AppsForBharat while at the company and later spun it off as a separate entity. Sachan is no longer a promoter at Trell. However, Trell is a “significant shareholder” in AppsForBharat, Trell CEO Pulkit Agarwal told ET.

AppsForBharat raised its seed funding round in April and garnered $14 million so far, including the latest fundraising.

The Bengaluru-based startup was founded in November 2020 and has a team of 25 people, which is expected to increase to 60 over the next two-three quarters. It intends to monetise through a membership model for certain services. Sachan, however, said the company is not looking to earn revenue in the next year.

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AppsForBharat’s first application, SriMandir, which is on Android, has about 500,000 monthly active users. Its daily active users spend 20-25 minutes on the app on average, Sachan said. About 40% of its users are aged between 18 and 35. SriMandir is a virtual destination for devotees to create their shrines, consume devotional content, connect with prayer groups, and access a large library of spiritual texts, scriptures, and videos.

“Any information that might help you practise devotion better is there on this particular app. We realise that there are more social needs on top of it where people would want to listen to Satsang and Pravachan and be able to engage in their communities,” Sachan said. “All of that is what we are putting together. So, that’s essentially what we are building with AppsForBharat broadly.”