Short-video sharing platform Spark has raised $20 million from nearly 5,000 investors by selling its cryptocurrency, GARI. Started in 2018, Chingari is in a way the Indian version of Tiktok. The company held an event for the sale of its cryptocurrency GARI for four days from November 2 to 5, during which it raised this huge amount. Earlier last month, the company raised $19 million for its crypto from 30 venture funds.
Spark is doing more than just taking advantage of the increased investor interest in the cryptocurrency market. Through this, the company is also establishing itself in the fiercely competitive short-video market in India, which is struggling to monetize its user base. Moneycontrol spoke to the company and some experts to understand what this spark bet means in crypto and how true the company’s claims are.
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about the spark
Chingari was started by Sumit Ghosh, Vishwatma Nayak and Deepak Salvi in 2018 when there was a lot of noise of Tiktok in the country. After about two years, the Government of India banned Tiktok, which proved to be a lifeblood for Spark. As of June 2020, Spark had 57 lakh downloads, which increased to 2.36 crore in a year. The spark app has been downloaded more than 80 million times and has 35 million active users. Apart from spark, this segment also has players like Moj, Josh and MX Takatak. Apart from this, these companies are also facing a tough challenge from Instagram.
Chingari was run by the founders for the first two years by investing their own money. It later raised about $40 million. At the same time, its rival companies like Moj and Josh have raised about $ 650 million so far in 2021. In such a situation, Spark needs to diversify itself to stay in the market. The company’s cofounder and CEO Sumit Ghosh said that we realized this about 6 months ago.
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He said, “You can’t compete by just copying (TikTok). Instagram will come and crush you. You have to innovate to stay in the market, you have to create something completely different and different from what’s already there. Must be better. Moj and Josh don’t realize it, but they are already or are out of the race or are happening.”
“That’s what inspired us to build this ($GARI). It’s something no other Indian competitor has done so far. Crypto gives us the much needed edge over other companies including Instagram,” Ghosh said.
bets on crypto
The company started building its token on the Solana blockchain 6-9 months ago, named $GARI. The first public sale of this token took place on November 2. As of November 5, the company had raised about $198 million from the public.
With the addition of $GARI to its platform, Spark will provide all content creators with an opportunity to earn money by selling their content through non-fungible tokens (NFTs), influencer marketing and advertisements. Bollywood actor Salman Khan launched Spark’s NFT marketplace where people can buy NFT videos of Salman.
Spark has so far brought in about $40 million from the sale of its cryptocurrency and wants to use the company to expand itself. Ghosh said the company is looking at expanding overseas as well. He said, “We are launching in Indonesia in November. TikTok is also present there. So this will help us to understand whether content creators choose spark and $GARI over TikTok, whether they like this new innovation. whether we do or not what we are bringing for them.”
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