The Indian short-form video app Mitron, which has been hailed as India’s answer to TikTok, has raised $5 million in funding led by Nexus Venture Partners. The round also saw participation from existing investors 3one4 Capital and Arun Tadanki’s private syndicate on LetsVenture.
Several notable angles and entrepreneurs like Deep Kalra, Founder and Chairman MakeMyTrip; Anand Chandrasekharan, Former Facebook executive; Karan Bajwa, MD, Google Cloud India; Radhika Ghai, Co-founder, ShopClues; Jiten Gupta, Founder, Jupiter; Shanti Mohan, Founder, LetsVenture; Amrish Rau, CEO, PineLabs; TK Kurien, Premji Invest; Manish Vij, and Harish Bahl, Smile Group also participated in their individual capacity.
The funding will be used primarily for product development, increasing user engagement, and for talent acquisition. It will also help the startup to onboard a network of content creators and invest in the platform’s brand.
The company will use the new infusion of capital to accelerate its product development to increase user engagement and hire high quality talent. The company also plans to onboard a wide network of Indian content creators on the app and invest in building Mitron brand.
The platform allows users to create, view, upload, and share short videos. Launched in April 2020, it was founded by Anish Khandelwal and Shivank Agarwal, who earlier worked at MakeMyTrip, and already has over 33 million downloads on Google’s Play Store. Mitron also claims to have over nine billion video views per month.
Before the ban on 59 Chinese apps, Mitron gained popularity for being a ‘Made in India’ app and, at the same time, TikTok’s rating fell to around two points. However, the app also faced its controversies, with Google removing it from the Play Store “due to violation of its ‘spam and minimum functionality’ policy”. However, the app was back soon enough.
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