Startup Deep Dive : Mitron — built on a $34 template, gone within two years of its TikTok-ban peak

Mitron crossed five million downloads within a month of its launch in April 2020, and by July that year Entrackr’s tracking of Google Play numbers put it at 25 million, riding the wave right after India banned 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok. It had not really been built in India at all in the way its marketing implied: the entire codebase was a $34 (about ₹2,570) template called TicTic, bought on CodeCanyon from a Pakistani software firm and rebranded, as the vendor himself confirmed to The Quint within weeks of launch.

By 2022 the company behind it, Mitron TV Private Limited, had raised $8.62 million from investors including Nexus Venture Partners and 3one4 Capital, touched a reported valuation of $36.1 million, and then folded into a share-swap deal with Koo worth ₹28.17 crore (about $2.9 million, converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) — a deal that, by most accounts, never fully closed before the app quietly stopped operating anyway. Koo itself, the company Mitron was meant to join, shut down entirely two years later. This is the story of how a geopolitical tailwind and a cloned app template built one of India’s fastest-growing apps of 2020, and why almost none of that growth survived contact with 2021.

Quick facts

What they do

Mitron was a short-video sharing app for Android, built for the same audience TikTok had spent two years winning over in India: smartphone-first users in smaller towns who wanted to record, watch and share vertical, music-backed clips in Hindi and regional languages. It never launched on Apple’s App Store, a gap Inc42’s coverage attributed to iOS’s stricter review process and developer fees. The pitch, repeated in the founders’ own interviews with YourStory in mid-2020, was that Mitron was a “real India” alternative to the Chinese-owned apps that dominated the category — a claim that would come under scrutiny almost immediately once the app’s own origins surfaced.

The origin

Shivank Agarwal, an IIT Roorkee graduate, and Anish Khandelwal, an NIT Nagpur graduate who had previously worked at MakeMyTrip, built Mitron in early 2020 as short-video apps were exploding in popularity across India and Chinese-owned platforms were coming under political pressure. Rather than building a video pipeline from scratch, Agarwal bought a ready-made app template called TicTic, sold on the CodeCanyon marketplace by a Pakistan-based developer, QBoxus, for $34 on 1 April 2020, according to The Quint’s reporting, which cited both the purchase record and QBoxus founder Irfan Sheikh. Agarwal rebranded the app, changed its splash screen and package name, and registered Mitron TV Private Limited in Bengaluru on 31 May 2020. The founders later told YourStory that the code was licensed legitimately through Envato, the marketplace that owns CodeCanyon, and that ownership of a purchased template was not in dispute — only the framing of Mitron as an original Indian build was.

The struggle years

The gap between the marketing and the mechanics caught up with Mitron fast. In early June 2020, Google removed the app from the Play Store for violating its “spam and minimum functionality” policies, most notably the absence of a privacy policy — a basic requirement for any app handling user-generated content, reported by multiple outlets including The Week and Business Today at the time. Mitron had already logged more than five million downloads by then, so the removal wiped out its primary distribution channel at the peak of its visibility.

The fix that got it reinstated within days was not much sturdier than the product it was patching. Inc42’s review of the resubmitted app, published 5 June 2020, found that its “new” privacy policy had not been drafted by a lawyer at all — it had been produced through a free online privacy-policy generator that simply swapped in the company name, the same tool-driven shortcut that had presumably produced the missing policy in the first place. Layered on top of that was the codebase controversy: The Quint’s 29 May 2020 report, and QBoxus’s own founder, had already established that the “Indian-made” app was a rebranded script sold 274 times over on CodeCanyon, which undercut the nationalist branding driving Mitron’s downloads in the first place.

The compliance patch bought time, but not durability. By November 2020, Entrackr’s tracking of app-store data showed Mitron’s trailing 30-day downloads had fallen to just 55,000, against 800,000 for rival Chingari and 35 million for the Chinese-linked Snack Video, which had stepped into the vacuum the TikTok ban was supposed to hand to Indian apps. Cumulative downloads since the 29 June 2020 China-app ban stood at only 11 million for Mitron, versus 190 million for Snack Video, 33 million for Roposo, 16 million for Chingari and 14 million for Trell — a near-death in relevance for an app that had briefly led the category five months earlier.

The turning point

The single event that defined Mitron’s trajectory was the Indian government’s ban on 59 Chinese-linked apps, including TikTok, on 29 June 2020. Before it, Mitron was a controversial but growing app: roughly 10 million downloads on Google Play by the time Entrackr covered its first institutional seed round on 1 July 2020, up from the five million it had logged in its first month back in April. After it, the numbers moved fast in both directions at once. Within two weeks, Entrackr reported Mitron had reached 25 million downloads, and capital followed the traffic: the ₹2 crore seed round from 3one4 Capital and LetsVenture closed on 1 July 2020, and a larger, Nexus Venture Partners-led round followed within the month. The same surge that made Mitron briefly investable, however, was borrowed from a single geopolitical decision rather than earned through retention — a distinction the download charts made obvious by that November.

The money behind it

• Seed round, 1 July 2020: ₹2 crore from 3one4 Capital and LetsVenture (₹1 crore each), valuing Mitron at ₹13.3 crore; both investors took convertible preference shares, diluting the founders from 45% each to 38.23% each (Entrackr, July 2020).
• Extended seed / pre-Series A, 13 July 2020: a further $1.5-2 million, reportedly flexible up to $3 million, led by Nexus Venture Partners, with former Commonfloor co-founder Sumit Jain and Citrus founder Amrish Rau investing individually (Entrackr, July 2020).
• Series A, later in 2020: $5 million led by Nexus Venture Partners, joined by 3one4 Capital, LetsVenture and angels including MakeMyTrip’s Deep Kalra, Amrish Rau and Jiten Gupta, as reported by Entrackr.
• Total raised: $8.62 million across four rounds from around 30 investors, with the final tranche of $3.33 million closing on 5 November 2020, per Tracxn’s funding database.
• Peak reported valuation: $36.1 million, as of 25 May 2021 (Tracxn) — a figure that was never confirmed by a subsequent priced round.
• Exit into Koo: Entrackr reported on 10 June 2022 that Koo had agreed to allot 3,182 Series B3 compulsorily convertible preference shares, valued at ₹28.17 crore, in exchange for 13,151 Mitron TV shares — an all-stock deal, not a cash acquisition. Talks had been reported as early as January 2022, which Mitron TV denied at the time.
• What actually happened next: per CB Insights and a later Entrackr report (21 August 2024), the Koo deal appears to have stalled, and Mitron TV “silently” ceased operating in the middle of 2022 regardless — co-founder Anish Khandelwal returned to MakeMyTrip in April 2022, and co-founder Shivank Agarwal stayed on only until September 2022.

How it makes money

• Intended model: in-app advertising and brand or creator partnerships on user-generated video, the same playbook rivals Chingari, Roposo and Moj were running — the model the founders described in interviews with YourStory through mid-2020, without publishing a take rate or ad-revenue figure.
• What was never disclosed: no ad-revenue run rate, cost-per-install economics or creator-payout structure was published while the app was live, despite $8.62 million of venture funding going in over 2020 (Tracxn).
• What the filings show instead: under its current name, Shovid Technologies Private Limited, the entity’s MCA-filed revenue never crossed ₹1 crore in any year from FY2020-21 to FY2024-25, per Tracxn’s compiled filings, with FY2024-25 revenue explicitly flagged as “less than ₹10 crore.”
• Where the small profits likely came from: in years such as FY2021-22, reported net profit (₹84.08 lakh) exceeded reported revenue (₹28.47 lakh) — a pattern consistent with interest income on leftover investor cash sitting in a largely dormant entity, rather than the video app generating an operating surplus.
• The part people got wrong: 25 million-plus downloads in mid-2020 were treated in the press and by some investors as a demand signal for a standalone Indian short-video business, when the numbers were, in large part, a one-time redirection of TikTok’s audience rather than an app people kept opening.

The numbers

Mitron TV never operated long enough to file the kind of growth-stage numbers that draw attention, and once it stopped operating as an app, the entity behind it — renamed Shovid Technologies Private Limited, same CIN, same cap table — kept filing minimal annual accounts anyway. The figures below, compiled by Tracxn from those filings, are in ₹ lakh, not crore, reflecting how small the residual entity had become.

Source: Tracxn’s legal-entity financial compilation for Mitron Tv Private Limited / Shovid Technologies Private Limited (accessed September 2026), which also flags FY2024-25 revenue as “less than ₹10 crore.”

Where the money comes from

• Single product, single market: Mitron never had a genuine segment or geography split to report — it was one Android app, aimed entirely at Indian users, that never launched on iOS (per Inc42’s contemporaneous coverage).
• Cap table over revenue: post-shutdown filings compiled by Tracxn show founders still held 54.88% of the renamed entity, funds — chiefly Nexus Venture Partners and 3one4 Capital — held 35.25%, angel investors held 1.42%, and an ESOP pool held 8.29%, a structure that moved surprisingly little given $8.62 million had come in from outside investors.
• The surprise: Koo itself appears among the entity’s recorded investors, a residue of the 2022 share-swap rather than a fresh capital infusion meant to fund growth — the “investment” was really an exit mechanism for existing shareholders, not new fuel for the product.
• What is missing: no revenue-by-city, revenue-by-language or ad-category breakdown was ever published for the roughly two years Mitron operated as a live app, which is itself informative about how thin the underlying business was beneath the download headlines.

The risks

• Borrowed-code risk: the entire product was a rebranded $34 CodeCanyon template (The Quint, May 2020); once that became public knowledge, it undercut both the “Indian alternative” marketing that was driving installs and any claim to defensible product IP, since the same script had already been sold 274 times to other buyers by its Pakistani vendor.
• Platform-dependency risk: relying entirely on the Google Play Store for distribution meant a single compliance gap — the missing privacy policy — could and did erase the app from its main distribution channel within weeks of its viral peak in June 2020, a mechanism any single-store app remains exposed to.
• Demand-shock risk: growth built on one geopolitical trigger, the 29 June 2020 China-app ban, rather than a retained user loop, proved temporary — trailing 30-day downloads fell to 55,000 by November 2020 from a run rate in the tens of millions only months earlier (Entrackr), leaving the business exposed the moment the initial wave of curiosity-driven switchers moved on to better-funded rivals like Snack Video.

The takeaway

Mitron’s chart looks, at a glance, like a start-up success story compressed into a single quarter: five million downloads in a month, 25 million within weeks of a competitor’s ban, millions of dollars from credible venture investors inside the same summer. Laid next to what came after — a Play Store suspension patched with a free privacy-policy generator, a codebase controversy the founders never fully shook off, a download collapse by that November, and an all-stock exit into a company that itself shut down two years later — the lesson is less about short video and more about timing versus durability. A regulatory or geopolitical tailwind can manufacture download numbers overnight; it cannot manufacture the reason for someone to open an app on the tenth day, the hundredth day, or the day a better-funded competitor shows up with the same opportunity and sturdier infrastructure. The founders’ own next move is telling: Shivank Agarwal did not try to rebuild Mitron after 2022, he moved on to a different company, Callmatic, raising a modest $100,000 rather than chasing another download spike.

Frequently asked questions

What was Mitron and who founded it?

Mitron was a short-video sharing app for Android, launched in India in early 2020 by Shivank Agarwal (IIT Roorkee) and Anish Khandelwal (NIT Nagpur, previously at MakeMyTrip), operated through Mitron TV Private Limited, incorporated in Bengaluru on 31 May 2020.

Was Mitron really built in India?

The app’s underlying codebase was not original. The Quint reported, and the Pakistani vendor QBoxus confirmed, that Mitron’s founders purchased a template called TicTic for $34 on CodeCanyon on 1 April 2020 and rebranded it, even though the company and its incorporation were Indian.

How much funding did Mitron raise, and what was it worth?

Mitron raised a reported $8.62 million across four rounds from about 30 investors, including Nexus Venture Partners and 3one4 Capital, according to Tracxn, reaching a reported valuation of $36.1 million as of 25 May 2021 — a figure never confirmed by a later priced round.

What happened to Mitron after its 2020 surge?

Downloads collapsed within months of the TikTok-ban-driven peak, falling to a 55,000 trailing 30-day run rate by November 2020 (Entrackr). In 2022, Koo agreed to a share-swap deal for Mitron TV worth ₹28.17 crore, but the app is reported by CB Insights and Entrackr to have quietly stopped operating in the middle of 2022 regardless, with both co-founders departing by September 2022.

Is Mitron still available today?

No. The app is reported to have ceased operating in mid-2022, and Koo, the company it was meant to merge into, shut down its own platform entirely on 3 July 2024, citing an unpredictable market, failed partnerships and high technology costs.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Mitron Tv bags Rs 2 Cr from 3One4 Capital and Lets Venture,” July 2020
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Mitron raises $2 Mn led by Nexus; Amrish Rau joins the seed round,” July 2020
• Entrackr, “Mitron TV, Chingari and Trell record steep fall in downloads, Snack Video outweighs all,” November 2020
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Twitter’s India alternative Koo to acquire Mitron TV,” June 2022
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Mitron TV, TrainMan co-founders set to launch AI startup Callmatic,” August 2024
• Inc42, “Mitron Makes A Comeback On Play Store With Dubious Privacy Policy,” June 2020
• The Quint, “Mitron vs TicTic App: How Viral App Mitron Bought & Rebranded Pakistan’s TicTic App,” May 2020
• Tracxn, Mitron company profile and Mitron Tv Private Limited / Shovid Technologies Private Limited legal-entity financials and shareholding data, accessed September 2026
• CB Insights, Mitron company profile, accessed September 2026
• Wikipedia, “Koo (social network),” accessed September 2026
• YourStory, “The untold story of how Mitron founders built a desi app that now rivals TikTok,” June 2020, and “Techie Tuesday: Anish Khandelwal’s journey from MakeMyTrip to building tech for TikTok rival Mitron,” August 2020

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