AppsForBharat, a product studio for spiritual and devotional content has scooped up $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Elevation Capital. Existing investors Sequoia Capital India, BEENEXT and Matrix Partners India, too participated in the round.

Apart from that, angel investors including Tiger Global’s Scott Shleifer, DST Global’s Saurabh Gupta and Meesho’s cofounders Vidit Aatrey and Cred’s founder Kunal Shah also pitched in.

The company said it will use the funding for creating content IPs, building the product, and hiring talent across the product, data, and engineering verticals.

Before this, in April, AppsForBharat had raised $4 million in seed funding co-led by Sequoia Capital India and BEENEXT which also saw participation from WEH Ventures. The firm has garnered $14 million so far, including the latest fundraising.

Founded in November 2020 by Prashant Sachan, AppsForBharat is developing a range of mobile apps that offer superior user experience and cater to the country's many underserved and often overlooked spiritual as well as devotional needs, it said in a statement.

“As early investors in multiple contents and social platforms, we have been close witnesses to the need gap for devotional platforms. When we met Prashant and heard his vision behind AppsForBharat, we instantly knew this is a business we want to be partners in. As we spoke to the users, we realised that the product is satisfying the needs of a very wide distribution of audience across age groups, geographic locations, and income brackets,” said Mayank Khanduja, Partner, Elevation Capital.

Sachan, who was the co-founder of the lifestyle centric short video app Trell until March, had incubated AppsForBharat while at the company and later spun it off as a separate entity

"Our aim is to build products that users love, one that becomes a daily habit for a billion Indians, products that offer happiness and peace. If someone (reading this) is passionate about building products for such needs, we invite them to join our team,” said Sachan.

The company’s first product - SriMandir aims to be the virtual destination for devotees to create their personalised shrines, consume devotional content, connect with prayer groups, and access a large library of spiritual texts, scriptures and videos. SriMandir has garnered over 1.3 million downloads on the Google Play Store, as per Sensor Tower data.

While AppsForBharat has no direct competitors, however, it competes with players who are operating in verticals like spirituality, devotion and Astro like Sutradhar, MyMandir, 27 Mantra among a few others.

(Edited by : Pradeep Suresh V)