Dhingana, a startup with a free service for streaming Indian and Bollywood music, has raised $7 million in Series B funding.
The company’s catalog includes 500,000 songs in 35 languages, which it makes available on its website and through smartphone apps. Dhingana says it has built an audience of 15 million monthly active visitors, making it the most popular service of its kind. And 40 percent of those visitors are located outside of India.
The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from previous investors Inventus Capital Partners and Helion Venture Partners. Lightspeed’s Dev Khare is joining the Dhingana board.
“We believe that a country as large and diverse as India, with numerous languages and rich classical, folk, popular and movie music traditions, supports a world-class, branded music service tuned to the needs of its increasingly mobile-centric population,” Khare said in the press release.
Founded in 2007, Dhingana spent its first few years focused on building its content library and attracting users, but it’s now moving forward with its monetization plans, starting with the launch of its ad platform back in August. At the time, the company also announced that Gokul Rajaram, Facebook’s product director for advertising, had signed on as advisor.
Dhingana is an Indian on-demand music service that wants its users to discover new traditional Indian and Bollywood music across the globe. Dhingana gives access to over 350,000 songs in more than 35 Indian languages and genres. The service is available for iOS, Blackberry, Google’s Play Store, Nokia Devices and on its homepage. Dhingana users can share music on Facebook and see what people are listening to via Facebook’s Open Graph. Users discovering music are able to like, favorite...
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