While living in the U.S., the Trivedi family was looking for a solution to follow a ritual practice of worshiping at one of India’s Jyotirlingas — a holy representation of the Hindu god Shiva. After searching on YouTube for ways to offer flowers and other items ceremonially at the Indian temple one Sunday in 2023, the family found a video about an emerging devotional app called Sri Mandir.
The app offers customized videos of ceremonial prayers from more than 50 Hindu temples in India and allows users to participate in prayers, offer donations, and access devotional content virtually from their iPhone or Android smartphone. That’s exactly what the Trivedi family was looking for.
It’s been about a year, and the Trivedis are still using Sri Mandir. One family member told TechCrunch that the app helps users do last-minute prayers and donate money to the temple of their faith, even while residing far from their home country and has access to local temples and priests. But it comes with a fairly high cost: The average monthly spend on Sri Mandir outside India is $100.
“Sri Mandir just translates rupees into dollars and costs a whole lot of money, which makes it an ultra-premium app, not for everyone with a low budget,” the user said.
The app taps into a growing need. As part of their years-old rituals, Hindus worldwide often visit temples of the gods and goddesses they follow, offer donations, and participate in prayers in search of peace, well-being, or better relationships. However, access to devotional services and religious information largely had been largely offline and unorganized in India.
Serial entrepreneur Prashant Sachan, who comes from a village near Uttar Pradesh’s industrial city Kanpur and previously co-founded social commerce startup Trell, founded Sri Mandir’s parent company, AppsForBharat, in November 2020. He was seeing even people from rural India beginning to come online, but noticed country’s devotional practices remained steadfastly offline.
“When I started experimenting, devotion was one behavior that I started thinking about because we thought this deserved the kind of attention that it hasn’t gotten,” Sachan said in an interview.
The three-year-old app boasts more than 30 million downloads since 2020, and just opened its access to markets outside India in January. Since then, Sachan told TechCrunch, the app has grown 25% to 30% month-on-month and garnered 500,000 registered users and 2.5 million installs outside India. Most of its global audience comes from the U.S., followed by Canada, the U.K. and the Middle East.
Sachan said the main users of Sri Mandir outside India are first and second-generation Indian-Americans who don’t often visit temples in India but want to connect to their roots.
This global footprint has helped Sri Mandir grow its revenues, which it generates from the small-ticket transactions users make through the app by offering prayers and donations. Currently, 25% Sri Mandir’s total revenue comes from outside India.
Alongside enabling users to connect with the temples of their faith, Sri Mandir helps priests in those temples get more devotees, eventually allowing them to earn more money. By dedicating five to six hours a week to the app, a priest typically makes about 25% to 30% more than their regular income from daily operations.
Manoj, a priest at Trimbakeshwar Shiva temple, located in the town of Trimbak in India’s western state of Maharashtra, told TechCrunch that Sri Mandir helps devotees, even those who aren’t physically fit but keen to participate in occasional prayers.
The priest gets 40 to 50 devotees through the Sri Mandir app weekly. He noted that the app also helps priests get more payments from devotees — the app charges individual users even for group prayers, whereas groups visiting the temple in person may not all pay individually. Manoj acknowledged, however, that it lacks the divine vibe that people get by physically being at a temple. He compared it to the difference between taking medicines at home and getting complete treatment after being admitted to a hospital.
AppsForBharat now hopes to help Sri Mandir reach more even more users. The Bengaluru-based startup has raised $18M in a Series B round led by Indian billionaire and tech veteran Nandan Nilekani’s Fundamentum Partnership.
The most downloaded app for Hindus
Sri Mandir is not alone in the market of devotional apps in the country: DevDham, Vama.app and Utsav offer similar offerings.
Nonetheless, with 30 million downloads since 2020, Sri Mandir is the only Hindu-focused app among the top 100 most downloaded devotional apps in the world, according to Sensor Tower data shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
Bhagavad Gita in Hindi (2 million downloads) and Sanatan (2 million) are the other most downloaded global Hindu devotional apps since 2020, per Sensor Tower.
That said, Sri Mandir is far behind globally in the most downloaded devotional apps. According to Sensor Tower, YouVersion Bible App (274 million downloads), Muslim Pro (132 million downloads), and King James Bible (122 million downloads) were the top three devotional apps since 2014.
Within India, Bible App for Kids (22 million downloads) and Muslim Pro (10 million downloads) are the two other most downloaded devotional apps — both trailing Sri Mandir.
On the revenues front, Hallow Prayer & Meditation is the highest-grossing app worldwide since 2020, where consumers have spent over $84 million on in-app purchases, per Sensor Tower. Sri Mandir, on the other hand, has garnered less than $100,000 in in-app purchases since 2020, according to Sensor Tower.
This is lower than the number one devotional app in India by consumer spending, the Joseph Prince Gospel Partner app, which has received over $300,000 in in-app purchases in India since 2020.
Next up: Relgious tourism
With its latest funding round, AppsForBharat plans to add features with the goal of capturing 5% to 10% of what it believes is a $50 billion potential market.
One of them is religious tourism through Sri Mandir.
Sachan told TechCrunch the startup plans help users make plans to visit temples and pilgrimage sites through its platform, in part by striking partnerships with traditional travel aggergators. The executive said that religious tourism pilots have already started with a select group of devotees.
The app will also facilitate special tickets for visiting sacred shrines and delivering prasad (food offerings to idols) and related devotional goods.
Further, the startup plans to build “a complex tech stack” with a CRM-like experience for temples and historical places in India. These services will initially be available for free, but the company eventually plans to charge them for managing those services, Sachan said.
The startup also intends to grow its temple network 10x, to 500 temples, in the next 12 to 18 months.
The company’s all-equity Series B round also saw participation from Susquehanna Asia VC, as well as AppsForBharat’s existing investors: Elevation Capital, Mirae Asset VC and Peak XV.