Firstprinciple Appsforbharat Pvt Ltd which runs, AppsForBharat, a product studio focused on building apps for spiritual and devotional needs, has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Elevation Capital along with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital India, BEENEXT and Matrix Partners India.
Prominent angel investors including Scott Schleifer of Tiger Global, Saurabh Gupta of DST Global, Ankush Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Pratap Singh of ShareChat, Utsav Somani of iSeed, Anshumani Ruddra of Google, Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal of Meesho, and Kunal Shah of CRED also contributed to the funding round, it added.
The company said it will use the funds to create content IPs, build the product, and hire talent across the product, data as well as engineering verticals.
Previously, AppsForBharat, raised $4 million in a seed round co-led by Sequoia Capital India and BEENEXT.
Founded by Prashant Sachan in 2020, AppsForBharat develops mobile apps focused on spiritual as well as devotional needs.
The products include spiritual, devotional, wellbeing, and meditation-related tools, communities and services.
The company indirectly competes with larger players like, Sutradhar, MyMandir, 27 Mantra who operates in verticals like devotion, astro and spirituality.
The platform's first application SriMandir, has about 500,000 monthly active users.
Its daily active users spend 20-25 minutes on the app on average, SriMandir is a virtual destination for devotees to create their shrines, consume devotional content, connect with prayer groups and access a large library of spiritual texts, scriptures, and videos.
As per Exper Market Research report, the Indian religious and spirituality market has reached $44 billion value in 2020.
The industry is expected to grow at a 10% annual compounded growth rate from 2021 to 2026.
