While 2020 saw a lot of pauses in many sectors and industry, it was the short-video platforms which emerged as the fastest-growing segment. The rise in the consumption of content in 2020 was also the rise of innovation and creativity.
The chief executive officer and co-founder of the indigenous short-video sharing app Chingari, Sumit Ghosh, told Entrepreneur India, “The fact that the app launched in 2018 after telecommunications company Jio’s entry in the Internet space, we saw that there was a huge Internet penetration in Bharat, tier-II, tier-III and tier-IV audience, but there was not any platform that catered to the regional/vernacular speaking Bharat users. Hence, I decided to get into this space and cater to billion of users and give them a platform to express and consume good content.”
Ghosh states that the company has always been rooting for developing an all-in-one Indian app that entertains and educates people and that is what makes their concept stand out.
The interactive short-video creation and sharing platform maintain that it has surpassed the average engagement time of platforms such as SnapChat and Facebook. With this, its user base is over 46 million, and more than 150 million videos are viewed on the platform, every day.
Its content is available in 20 languages with diverse content in local languages on the platform which further improves the user experience and apart from India, the app is steadily increasing its users in countries such as UAE, the US, Kuwait, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and others.
“Chingari is a homegrown app. The Prime Minister’s call for ‘Vocal for Local’ has influenced many and sparked the sentiment inside people’s hearts. We at Chingari are focused on making our app accessible to all the citizens of India in order to showcase their talent. Our team is also focused on developing Indianizedartificial reality (AR) filters, thus setting a great example for the vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat and Vocal for Local,” he explained.
The founder further maintains that the establishment has raised INR 100 million in funding over two rounds of funding and is looking to raise another round of funds.
Ghosh shared rather ecstatically, “Social media is the new source of information. A huge number of people follow Chingari on every platform such as Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. From news to style, fashion, and food everything is out there on social media. And for Chingari where content distribution is the main point of art, social media really helps us to grow and reach more audiences.”
He shared that one of the proudest moments for him and his team was when the Prime Minister of India, NarendraModimentionedChingari in Mann ki Baat and when Anand Mahindra tweeted about the app.
The short-video app head revealed that fortunately it was a year of success and many achievements for the platform, with that he lines up his next trigger of growth to make sure that every content creator on-boards the platform should get the opportunity to earn and also scale it to grow, globally. The founder then sets the intention for his brand in the future to work on bettering the product with improved features and a lot of creators joining their platform.
Chingari collaborates with Merchant Records