Made in India Social App Chingari picks up funding from Tinder’s CPO Brian Norgard, OLX Founder - Fabrice Grinda 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, and from leading French entrepreneur Fabrice Grinda, Founder of OLX.

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 into 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.”

Fabrice Grinda said, “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 and the platform defeated its competitors with a big margin. Recently Union Minister Dr. RaviShankar Prasad, specially mentioned Chingari and praised the App in his interview with Shashi Shekar on Hindustan Times TV.

The officials of the desi app, with more than 25 million downloads, have stated that the funds will be utilised mostly on product development, hiring talented engineering team of ML/AI engineers and engineering team 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.