Indian TikTok Competitor Chingari Raises $19 Million from Galaxy Digital, Alameda Research, Kraken, and Others

The crypto craze seems to be major gaining traction in India as video-sharing app Chingari concludes a $19 million funding round.

Indian Video-Sharing App Chingari Raises $19 million

On October 8, India-based TikTok competitor and short-videos application Chingari announced it successfully raised $19 million from the leading crypto VC firms to launch its social token on the high-performance, low-cost Solana blockchain.

Notably, Chingari raised the funds from numerous reputed crypto VC firms such as Alameda Research, Kraken, Galaxy Digital, Solana Capital, and Republic Crypto.

Other notable investors in the funding round are BlackPine, NGC Ventures, CoinFund, LD Capital, Borderless Capital, AU21 Capital, Cultur3 Capital, Long Term Ventures, Afton Capital, and CSP DAO.

For the uninitiated, Chingari was founded in 2018 that grew in popularity exponentially after India’s ban on the Chinese video app TikTok in June 2020. At present, Chingari boasts 30 million monthly users and more than 78 million downloads.

The Bengaluru-based video-sharing app was founded in 2018 by Sumit Ghosh, Deepak Salvi, Aditya Kothari, and Biswatma Nayak.

The funds raised via the latest financing round consist of leading stablecoins such as USDC and USDT. Accordingly, the funds will be used toward product development and to launch a social token dubbed $GARI powered by the Solana blockchain.

In addition, Chingari will use the funds toward launching and fostering various creator monetization avenues within the app via Web3.0 tools.

The company said:

“The token is a critical piece of the platform, enabling creators to set up their e-commerce space that includes physical merchandise, their NFT creations, and the ability for fans to fund their favourite artists.”

Similar sentiments were echoed by Sumit Ghosh, CEO, Chingari. He said:

“The future of a platform lies in its creators. On one side, we have an immense talent pool that needs to be explored and rewarded with an ethical amount of monetization. On the other side, while crypto experiences a rapid expansion in India, $GARI is poised to make it mainstream.”