MUMBAI: Social music streaming service Dhingana today announced that it has closed $7 million in a Series B round funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
It also saw participation from Series A investors Inventus Capital Partners and Helion Venture Partners.
Dhingana has 15 million monthly active visitors worldwide, and is an on-demand, streaming Bollywood and Indian music service across the globe. Its music catalog features 500,000 songs spanning 35 languages across numerous genres. Dhingana users can access this catalogue on-demand through Dhingana’s HTML5 site and apps for iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, Android devices and Nokia phones.
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Speaking with Radioandmusic.com, Dhingana co-founder and CEO Snehal Shinde said, “Till date our principal objective and focus was on product and technology, but now we have decided to concentrate on business development, marketing and sales also. We have always had a laser sharp focus on building the best streaming product for Indian music lovers across the globe and used the first round of funding for the same. We plan to use the current funds to build an even stronger team to innovate further and expand our marketing, sales and business development efforts.”
In addition to the new funding, Dhingana also announced that Lightspeed Venture Partners principal Dev Khare will be joining Dhingana’s Board of Directors. Khare has extensive experience in Silicon Valley, where he has advised a significant number of mobile start-ups.
Khare said, “We are impressed with the level of product execution and audience growth at Dhingana. 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.”
“We are excited to be participating in a company that is not only meeting the significant demand for this music, but which offers a library and solution that you simply can’t find on other popular streaming music services like Pandora and Spotify,” commented Inventus Capital Partners managing director John Dougery.
Twin brothers Snehal and Swapnil Shinde launched Dhingana.com in February 2007. The co-founders come with over 10 years of experience in driving Engineering and Product Management for companies like Yahoo, IBM, and Symantec in the past. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Dhingana also has their offices in Pune, India.
