Startup Deep Dive : Chingari — from 30 million TikTok-ban downloads to a crypto crash and a live-streaming pivot

Chingari crossed 30 million downloads within three months of the government’s June 2020 ban on Chinese apps, and for a while it looked like India’s homegrown answer to TikTok. Five years later, the company that got a crypto token to $40 million in trading commitments within 24 hours is running a paid, private live-streaming app whose revenue fell from ₹113 crore in FY23 (₹1.13 billion, $11.8 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) to ₹44 crore in FY25.

That is not the arc most people remember. Chingari is usually filed away as “the TikTok-ban app” or “the one with the Salman Khan crypto token.” Both are true, and both are only half the story. The fuller story is about a four-person Bengaluru team that pivoted its product at least four times in seven years, rode a geopolitical accident to 30 million downloads, tried to convert that attention into a blockchain business, watched that business lose 80% of its value in under two hours, and is now a much smaller live-streaming company still losing money, just less of it each year.

Quick facts

What they do

Chingari today is a live-streaming app: creators go live and users pay to interact with them, one on one or in a room, using an in-app virtual currency the company calls diamonds. That is a change from the product most people know it for. Between 2018 and mid-2023, Chingari was a short-video app — record a clip, add music or effects, publish it to a public feed, much like TikTok — built for Indian users in regional languages, with a Salman Khan-endorsed crypto token bolted on from late 2021. The pivot to paid live-streaming, announced in June 2023, followed a collapse in the short-video and crypto business, and it is the product the company runs as of its most recent filed financial year, FY25.

The origin

Sumit Ghosh had already run two companies before Chingari — an IT services shop called Globussoft, then a marketing-automation venture called Socioboard — when he teamed up with Biswatma Nayak, Deepak Salvi and Aditya Kothari in Bengaluru in 2018. Nayak, an Android developer who had spent years building and scaling social and dating apps, had already sketched out a short-video sharing product. The founders’ read on the market was straightforward: Reliance Jio had by then put an estimated $30 billion into building out 4G networks across India, and hundreds of millions of new, price-sensitive internet users in small-town and rural India — the audience the founders called “Bharat,” as distinct from English-speaking metro “India” — suddenly had cheap data and nothing built for them to watch or make. ShareChat had already shown a regional-language social app could work. Chingari launched on the Play Store that November as a WhatsApp Status clip-sharing tool before widening into full short-video.

The struggle years

For its first year and a half, Chingari was a minor app fighting for attention against ShareChat’s Moj, TikTok itself, and a dozen other regional clones — small download numbers, no real revenue model, no obvious reason it would outlast better-funded rivals. The company’s own co-founder has since described the seven years since as a story of repeated pivots rather than one clean growth line: from status-sharing tool, to short-video app, to a crypto-and-NFT platform, to today’s live-streaming product.

The crypto pivot brought the sharpest reversal. Chingari launched its Solana-based GARI token in November 2021 with a public sale that drew a reported $40 million in commitments within 24 hours, and by January 2022 the token was seeing roughly $100 million of trading volume in a single day. On 4 July 2022, that unwound in public: GARI’s price fell from about $0.73 to $0.13 in the space of ninety minutes, an intraday drop of more than 80%, after a large wallet — a “whale” — dumped roughly two million tokens on the exchange KuCoin. Retail holders called it a rug pull; GARI Network’s Sumit Ghosh called it a “black swan event” and denied the company was behind the sell-off. Whichever framing is right, the token never recovered its 2021–22 trading levels.

The corporate side unravelled soon after. Co-founder Aditya Kothari announced his exit in May 2023, saying he had actually resigned around 15 months earlier over disagreements on vision, leadership style and culture, and had stayed on publicly until a transition was arranged. Weeks later, in June 2023, Chingari laid off about 20% of a roughly 240-person team — around 48 people, concentrated in engineering — citing “organisational restructuring,” alongside the pivot away from short video into live-streaming. It was not enough: in August 2023, a cash crunch forced a second round of layoffs that removed more than half of the remaining staff and pushed some employees onto pay cuts of up to 50%.

Two documented near-death points, then, inside eighteen months: the GARI crash of July 2022, which vaporised the value of the company’s flagship crypto product overnight, and the double layoff of June–August 2023, which shrank the org chart by more than half while a founding partner walked out the door.

The turning point

The single event that gave Chingari a shot at scale was not a funding round or a product launch — it was the Indian government’s ban of 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok, on 29 June 2020, in the middle of a border standoff with China. TikTok had roughly 200 million users in India at the time it went dark. Chingari, a small app until then, crossed 10 million downloads on the Play Store within about a week of the ban, and by September 2020 — three months on — it had passed 30 million downloads, according to contemporary reporting. That is the before-and-after: a fringe app that suddenly had tens of millions of installs and a genuine claim to being a domestic TikTok replacement, without having built any of the monetisation or retention infrastructure that scale requires. Rivals with deeper backing, chiefly ShareChat’s Moj and Times Internet’s Josh, converted the same opening into more durable market share; Chingari converted it into a funding story and, eighteen months later, a crypto token.

The money behind it

Chingari has raised a reported $61.6 million in aggregate across roughly six rounds since 2018, per data aggregator Tracxn/TheKredible figures current as of 2026 — a number the company has not itself published in full, so it should be read as reported rather than confirmed. Some of the round-by-round detail is independently documented in contemporary press:

• April 2021 — about $13 million raised in a round led by telecom-services firm OnMobile Global, which paid ₹31.8 crore for a reported 10% equity stake (Chingari company blog, 2021; TechGraph, April 2021). The same round brought in actor Salman Khan personally, who took $1.8 million of shares to become global brand ambassador, with his agency Uniworld Being Talented taking a further $200,000 of shares (TechGraph; IndianStartupNews, April 2021). Other participants named in coverage include Republic Labs, Astarc Ventures, White Star Capital and India TV’s Rajat Sharma.
• September 2021 — a Series A reported at $19 million with crypto-trading firm Alameda Research named as lead investor (funding-data aggregator Clay/CB Insights, cited 2026); this figure is aggregator-sourced and not independently confirmed in contemporary press found for this piece, so it is flagged here as reported rather than verified.
• November 2021 — the GARI token’s public sale raised $40 million in commitments within 24 hours on the Republic platform (Business Standard, November 2021).
• January 2022 — a $15 million extension led by Republic Capital, with OnMobile, JPIN Venture Catalysts and a set of family offices participating; contemporary coverage (TechRadar, DealStreetAsia, CoinDesk, January 2022) put the resulting valuation at about $500 million, while data aggregators TheKredible and Tracxn separately record a ₹625 crore (about $75 million, as reported) valuation dated 9 February 2022. The two figures are roughly seven times apart for what appears to be the same funding event; this piece reports both because neither can be independently confirmed against the other.
• April 2022 — Chingari was reported to be in talks to raise a new round at a $1 billion valuation (Startup Story, April 2022); no completed round at that valuation has been documented, and the talks do not appear to have closed.
• February 2023 — an undisclosed equity investment from Aptos Labs, tied to a planned relaunch of the app on the Aptos blockchain by the second quarter of 2023 (The Week; Inc42, February 2023).

No valuation newer than the disputed January–February 2022 figures has been publicly reported as of September 2026, and the company has not filed for an IPO.

How it makes money

The revenue model has changed with each pivot, and the FY22–FY23 filings do not break out the split cleanly:

• 2018–2021: in-app advertising on the short-video feed, the standard model for a free content app with no clear secondary revenue line.
• 2021–2023: advertising plus what the company’s own FY23 filing lumps together as “sale of services” — Entrackr’s reporting on that filing notes it “looks like most of its collection came via advertising and crypto activities,” though Chingari did not publish an exact break-up (Entrackr, February 2024).
• From June 2023: a paid, private live-streaming model. Users buy virtual “diamonds” with real money; those diamonds are spent on one-to-one video interactions and gifts to creators, who convert diamonds back into a cash payout, with Chingari keeping a spread — the same mechanic used by apps like Bigo Live and Chamet.

The part people consistently get wrong is where that live-streaming revenue now comes from. Chingari is remembered as an Indian short-video app for Indian users, but in FY25 only 28% of its ₹44 crore revenue was domestic (₹12.2 crore); 72% (₹31.3 crore) was export revenue, i.e. earned from users and payment flows outside India (Entrackr, March 2026). The India-market, India-language positioning that built the brand is no longer where the money is made. On costs, FY25 spending was concentrated in advertising and promotion (₹23.75 crore), employee benefits (₹13.4 crore) and IT expenses (₹9 crore), against total expenditure of ₹52.4 crore — meaning the company spent about ₹1.2 for every ₹1 of revenue it earned that year (Entrackr, March 2026).

The numbers

Figures below are revenue from operations and net loss as reported in Chingari’s financial filings, per Entrackr’s reporting (February 2024 for FY22–FY23; March 2026 for FY24–FY25). Unit: ₹ crore.

• FY23 revenue of ₹113 crore was the peak of the four years shown, more than double FY22’s roughly ₹49 crore, driven by the short-video-plus-crypto model (Entrackr, February 2024; YourStory, February 2024).
• FY23 net loss of ₹42 crore was a 70% reduction from FY22’s ₹139 crore loss (Entrackr, February 2024; Inc42, February 2024).
• Revenue then fell in both of the following years as the company pivoted to live-streaming and shrank its operations: down to ₹92 crore in FY24, then down a further 52% to ₹44 crore in FY25 (Entrackr, March 2026).
• Losses have narrowed every year since the FY22 peak, from ₹139 crore to ₹8.8 crore in FY25, a smaller loss on a much smaller revenue base (Entrackr, March 2026).
• Cash on hand was reported at ₹2.2 crore as of March 2025 (Entrackr, March 2026) — a thin buffer for a company still posting annual losses.

Where the money comes from

• Geography, FY25: export/foreign revenue ₹31.3 crore (72% of the total); domestic India revenue ₹12.2 crore (28%) (Entrackr, March 2026).
• Platform scale: the company reported roughly 10 crore cumulative Android downloads as of its FY25 filing period (Entrackr, March 2026).
• User base, self-reported: departing co-founder Aditya Kothari described Chingari as having “170 Mn+ users” in his May 2023 exit statement (Inc42, May 2023) — a company-linked, unaudited figure.
• User base, later company claim: parent entity Tech4Billion Media stated in a July 2026 press release that it serves “180 million+ users” across its Chingari and AstroLive platforms combined, alongside a projected ₹50 crore revenue for FY26 (Business Standard/ANI press release, July 2026) — again company-stated and not independently verified.
• The surprise: an app built and marketed as a made-in-India, Bharat-first alternative to TikTok now earns almost three-quarters of its revenue outside India, through a live-streaming product with no obvious geographic branding at all.

The risks

• Regulatory exposure on crypto-linked products. From April 2025, India’s markets regulator SEBI began overseeing crypto tokens that resemble securities — those offering governance or voting rights or returns tied to a third party’s efforts (Policy Circle, April 2025). GARI was explicitly designed to let holders “place governance votes,” which is the exact category SEBI has flagged; any relaunch or continuation of the token carries fresh compliance risk that did not exist when it launched in 2021.
• Reputational overhang from the GARI crash. The token’s more-than-80% intraday drop in July 2022, and the “rug pull” accusations that followed a large wallet’s sell-off on KuCoin, are now a permanent part of Chingari’s public record (Forbes India; Business Today, July 2022). Whether or not the company was involved, as it denies, the episode makes any future token-based or crypto-adjacent product a harder sell to both users and regulators.
• Competitive and revenue concentration risk. Chingari now competes for live-streaming spend against globally scaled apps such as Bigo Live and Chamet, and for short-form attention against Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Moj, all backed by far larger platforms. A 52% year-on-year revenue decline in FY25 (Entrackr, March 2026) suggests the live-streaming pivot has not yet found a defensible position, and with 72% of revenue coming from export markets, the business is exposed to whichever single foreign market or payment channel is driving that flow — a concentration the public filings do not break down further.

The takeaway

Chingari’s history is a useful corrective to the idea that a sudden windfall of users — 30 million downloads in three months, in this case — is itself a business. The TikTok ban handed Chingari an audience it had not earned through product superiority, and the company spent the next two years trying to monetise that audience through the fastest available route, a crypto token, rather than through a durable, defensible core product. When the token collapsed, there was no fallback revenue engine strong enough to carry the company at its ban-era scale, and the business has spent the years since shrinking back down to a size its actual product — paid live-streaming, sold mostly to users outside India — can support. The lesson is not that pivots are bad; it is that a pivot funded by hype rather than by a proven unit economics engine borrows against a future the company has to earn all over again.

Frequently asked questions

Is Chingari still a short-video app like TikTok?

No. Chingari ran as a short-video app from 2018 until it pivoted in June 2023 to a paid, private live-streaming model, where users pay with in-app “diamonds” to interact with creators (company statements reported by Entrackr, March 2026).

What happened to Chingari’s GARI crypto token?

GARI, a Solana-based token launched in November 2021, raised $40 million in commitments within 24 hours of its public sale and later saw roughly $100 million in daily trading volume, but it crashed more than 80% in intraday trading on 4 July 2022 after a large wallet sold off tokens on KuCoin, and it has not recovered to its 2021–22 levels (Business Standard, November 2021 and January 2022; Business Today, July 2022).

How much funding has Chingari raised in total?

Data aggregators Tracxn and TheKredible report a cumulative $61.6 million raised across roughly six rounds since 2018, though the company has not published a full consolidated figure itself, so this should be treated as reported rather than confirmed.

Is Chingari profitable?

No. It has posted a net loss every year for which figures are available, though the loss has narrowed each year from ₹139 crore in FY22 to ₹8.8 crore in FY25, on correspondingly shrinking revenue (Entrackr, February 2024 and March 2026).

Who are Chingari’s biggest backers?

Reported investors include OnMobile Global (a roughly 10% stake), Republic Capital, Aptos Labs and actor Salman Khan, who invested personally and became global brand ambassador in 2021 (TechGraph and IndianStartupNews, April 2021; The Week, February 2023).

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Bitcourier, interview with Sumit Ghosh, “We have Created the Platform…” (undated, accessed September 2026)
• Inc42, “Chingari’s Sumit Ghosh On Building A Bharat-First Social Media Platform” (accessed September 2026)
• Best Media Info / Chingari company blog, “Rising Star: Biswatma Nayak, Co-founder, Chingari” (July 2021)
• WION, “TikTok ban: Chingari app crosses 10 million downloads on Play Store” (July 2020)
• Business Standard, “TikTok ban effect: Made-in-India app Chingari crosses 30 mn downloads” (September 2020)
• Business Standard, “Chingari’s crypto token raises $40mn within 24 hours of its live sale” (November 2021)
• Business Standard, “Chingari’s native crypto token sees $100 mn of trading volume in a day” (January 2022)
• The Quint, “Salman Khan-Backed GARI Token Tanks in Value Post Major Dump, Investors Cry Foul” (July 2022)
• Business Today, “Salman Khan endorsed crypto, GARI crashes 80%; what caused the crash?” (July 2022)
• Forbes India, “Bollywood A-lister backed Gari token’s plunge sparks rug pull rumours” (2022)
• TechGraph, “Bollywood Actor Salman Khan invests in short video app Chingari” (April 2021)
• IndianStartupNews, “After a $13 million fundraise, Chingari onboards Salman Khan as brand ambassador and investor” (April 2021)
• Chingari company blog, “OnMobile paid Rs 31.8 crore for 10% stake in Chingari” (2021)
• TechRadar, “Homegrown TikTok rival Chingari raises $15 million in new funding” (January 2022)
• DealStreetAsia, “Republic Capital leads $15m funding in Chingari and 24 other India deals” (January 2022)
• Entrackr, “Chingari raises $15 Mn in Series A round by Republic Capital” (January 2022)
• Startup Story, “Video sharing platform Chingari in talks to raise funds at $1 billion valuation” (April 2022)
• The Week, “Aptos Labs makes equity investment in Chingari” (February 2023)
• Inc42, “Short-Video App Chingari Bags Funding From Aptos Labs To Enter New Markets” (February 2023)
• TheKredible, “Chingari – Profile overview funding, Valuation, Financial, News” (data as of 2026)
• Tracxn, “Chingari – 2026 Company Profile, Team, Funding, Competitors & Financials” (data as of 2026)
• Inc42, “Short-Video App Chingari’s Cofounder Aditya Kothari Quits” (May 2023)
• Inc42, “Exclusive: Weeks After Cofounder’s Exit, Short-Video App Chingari Lays Off 20% Workforce” (June 2023)
• Business Today, “Indian app Chingari lays off 20% employees for ‘organisational restructuring'” (June 2023)
• Inc42, “Exclusive: Chingari Sacks Over 50% Employees In Second Round Of Layoffs” (August 2023)
• Entrackr, “Chingari crosses Rs 100 Cr revenue in FY23; losses decline 70%” (February 2024)
• YourStory, “Chingari sees 2.3X jump in revenue in FY23, losses decline” (February 2024)
• Inc42, “Chingari’s Loss Narrows Nearly 70% To INR 42.5 Cr In FY23” (February 2024)
• Entrackr, “Chingari’s operating scale declines 53% in FY25” (March 2026)
• Policy Circle, “Crypto regulation in India: Why SEBI is set to step in” (April 2025)
• Business Standard / ANI press release, “Parent firm of Chingari, Tech4Billion Media unveils homegrown virtual wellness platform Calorie Tracker Buddy” (July 2026)

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