Homegrown short-form video app Mitron has raised $5 million in a round led by Nexus Venture Partners. 3one4 Capital and Arun Tadanki’s private syndicate on LetsVenture also participated in the latest round.

Mitron is a short-form social video app that allows users to create, upload, view and share one-minute videos. It was launched in April 2020 in the midst of the national lockdown and achieved the 10 million download milestone even before the ban on Chinese apps by India, said the company. Mitron was founded by Shivank Agarwal (alumnus of IIT-Roorkee) and Anish Khandelwal (alumnus of Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology), who had earlier worked together at MakeMyTrip.

The latest round of financing saw participation from marquee angels including Deep Kalra (Chairman, MakeMyTrip), Amrish Rau (CEO, Pine Labs), Jiten Gupta (founder, Jupiter), Amarjit Batra (MD, Spotify India), Anand Chandrasekharan (former Facebook, Snapdeal executive), Karan Bajwa (MD, Google Cloud, India), Radhika Ghai (co-founder, Shopclues), Vikalp Sahni (co-founder and ex-CTO at GoIbibo and Volunteer Architect at AarogyaSetu) and Shanti Mohan (founder, LetsVenture). TK Kurien (Premji Invest), Manish Vij and Harish Bahl (Smile Group) also participated in their individual capacity.

The company plans to use the new infusion of capital to accelerate its product development and hire talent. It also plans to onboard a wide network of Indian content creators on the app and invest in building the Mitron brand.

“We are thrilled to have Nexus Venture Partners join us in this journey, bringing in deep expertise of helping their portfolio companies build great products,” said Agarwal, Mitron’s founder and CEO. “We are committed to building Mitron as a world-class product that is designed for Indian users, by re-imagining digital entertainment and engagement. With more than 33 million downloads on Google Play and 9 billion video views per month, Mitron has emerged as the popular choice among Indians for short-form video.”

Asked how Mitron is different from TikTok, Khandelwal, founder and CTO, said: “We are not a category specific platform like TikTok, which focusses on light humour. We are focussed on showcasing various skill sets on our platform like dancing, painting, cooking, acting, singing etc by bringing in diverse talent creators who can create content in any language and distributing it to the right user base through our AI-based recommendation system.”

Mitron received a special mention in the Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge in the Social category.

Pratik Poddar, Principal at Nexus Venture Partners, said: “Shivank and Anish are product-first, deep-tech and very iterative entrepreneurs. We have been tracking them for three months and loved the way they have evolved their thinking around content creation, community management and video delivery. We love backing ‘product and tech-first’ entrepreneurs. We believe eventually the best product with long-term thinking will win. Focus is to create a high engagement and high retention community. Then only you can be long term partners for creators.”

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