Mitron TV, one of the early short-video apps that found traction last year after India banned the Chinese app TikTok, is now seeing some churn. This comes as short-video app competitors, such as Moj and Josh, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of Tiger Global and Google respectively.

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Sources tell CNBC-TV18 that Mitron has laid off several members from its team of 60. The company is now focusing mainly on its new stack of video editing tools meant for creators, they added.

However, Mitron co-founder and CEO Shivank Agarwal, told CNBC-TV18 that only a few people have been laid-off and the company is hiring for tech roles.

“We are a tech and product-first company, and building a strong team with the right people is a continuous process for us. We have consolidated and re-evaluated a few roles at Mitron TV while aggressively hiring for the technical and product teams. The exit number is in single digits. Also at the same time, we have onboarded more people for the right roles than we parted ways with,” Agarwal said.

While Agarwal said less than 10 employees were laid off, one of the sources said the number could be higher, including those in senior roles.

Two sources aware of the developments said Mitron is now focusing on video editing tools, given the tough competition from other apps in the short-video format.

Moj, a platform run by the company that also operates social media platform Sharechat, raised a whopping $502 million in April this year. The funding was led by Tiger Global, along with the US social media company Snap Inc.

VerSe Innovation, which runs short video platform Josh as well as news content platform DailyHunt, raised $100 million from Google and Microsoft late last year and went on to bag another $100M+ from Qatar Investment Authority and Glade Brook Capital Partners in February. ​​

Google also invested in a $145 MN funding round of InMobi subsidiary Glance, which owns the short video platform Roposo.

All three companies that run Moj, Josh and Roposo turned unicorns with their funding rounds.

Chingari, another rival in the space, had also recently announced funding from Bollywood actor Salman Khan, as well as a $13 million round from OnMobile Global Limited, a global player in mobile entertainment.

On the other hand, Mitron TV has not been able to bag big cheques. It had raised $5 million last year, in a fund-raising round, led by Nexus Venture Partners, 3one4 Capital, Let’s Venture, 9Unicorns, Venture Catalysts and a few angel investors. There could be an intermediary fundraise for the company soon, one of the sources said,

The young company claims to have seen good traction since its launch in April last year and says it has crossed 50+ million downloads on the Android Play Store and has 9 billion video views per month.

However, given the tough competition in the short video space, the company is now channelling its focus on its newly launched app MontagePro, a video editing app, sources said.

“It is not exactly a pivot, but much of the focus and resources will go towards the new app,” one of the sources cited above said.

Agarwal said the company will retain focus on both apps.

“Mitron TV is seeing steady growth. We've been concentrating on several in-app features, such as Live Streaming and improved editing tools. We have launched various campaigns for known brands and government bodies, like MyGov, FSSAI's Eat Right initiative, among others. We have been running educational campaigns, such as #VirusToVaccine, with prominent doctors from the medical community for the LIVE feature. Also, creators use our Live feature to interact with their users regularly,” Agarwal said.

“At the same time, we have been working with the creator community to improve their video editing experience and reduce their reliance on external/standalone editor apps. We discovered that as Mitron's camera and editor's editing capabilities improved, creators began to use it not only for posting videos on Mitron but also for exporting videos to share on other social media platforms.

We took a cue from that and created MontagePro, a free video editor app for our creator community that has helped us build a loyal following of creators,” he added.

(Edited by : Yashi Gupta)

First Published:Jun 26, 2021 2:47 PM IST