While living in the United States, the Trivedi family was looking for a solution to a ritualistic worship practice at an Indian Jyotirlinga temple—a sacred representation of the Hindu god Shiva. After searching YouTube for ways to ceremoniously offer flowers and other items at the Indian temple on a Sunday in 2023, the family came across a video about a startup worship app called Sri Mandir.
The app features personalized videos of festive prayers from over 50 Hindu temples across India and allows users to participate in prayers, make donations, and access religious content virtually from their iPhone or Android smartphones. That’s exactly what the Trivedi family was looking for.
Almost a year later, the Trivedi family is still using Sri Mandir. A family member told TechCrunch that the app helps users perform last-minute prayers and donate money to their religious temple, even when they’re away from home and have access to local temples and priests. But it comes at a high cost: The average monthly spend on a Sri Mandir outside of India is $100.
The user said: “Sri Mandir app translates rupees to dollars and costs a lot of money, which makes it a high-end app, not for everyone with a low budget.”
The app fills a growing need. As part of their centuries-old rituals, Hindus around the world visit temples of their gods and goddesses, make donations, and participate in prayers in search of peace, well-being, or better relationships. However, access to religious services and information has been largely offline and unregulated in India.
Serial entrepreneur Prashant Sachan, who hails from a village near the industrial city of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh 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 starting to get online, but noticed that devotional practices in the country remained largely offline.
“When I started experimenting, dedication was one of the behaviors I started thinking about because we thought it deserved this kind of attention that it wasn’t getting,” Sachan said in an interview.
The three-year-old app boasts over 30 million downloads since 2020, and just opened its reach to markets outside India in January. Since then, Sachan told TechCrunch, the app has grown 25% to 30% month-on-month, garnering 500,000 registered users and 2.5 million installs outside India. Most of its global audience comes from the US, followed by Canada, the UK, and the Middle East.
The main users of Sri Mandir outside India are first- and second-generation Indian Americans who don’t visit temples in India often but want to connect with their roots, Sachan said.
This global presence has helped Sri Mandir increase its revenue, which it generates from micro-transactions made by users through the app through offering prayers and donations. Currently, 25% of Sri Mandir’s total revenue comes from outside India.
In addition to connecting users to their faith-based temples, the Sri Mandir app helps priests at those temples attract more devotees, which ultimately allows them to earn more money. By dedicating five to six hours a week to the app, a priest typically earns 25% to 30% more than their normal income from day-to-day operations.
Manoj, a priest at the Trimbakeshwar Shiva Temple, located in the town of Trimbak in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, told TechCrunch that Sri Mandir helps devotees, even those who are not physically fit but are keen to participate in the occasional prayers.
The priest receives 40 to 50 devotees through the Sri Mandir app every week. He noted that the app also helps the priests get more payments from devotees — the app charges individual users even for group prayers, while groups visiting the temple in person may not all pay individually. However, Manoj acknowledged that the app lacks the divine ambience that people get by being physically present at the temple. He compared it to the difference between taking medicines at home and getting full treatment after being hospitalized.
AppsForBharat now hopes to help Sri Mandir reach more users. The Bengaluru-based startup has raised $18 million in a Series B funding round led by Indian billionaire and tech veteran Nandan Nilekani’s Fundamentum Partnership.
Most downloaded app for Hindus
Sri Mandir is not alone in the country’s religious app market: DevDham, Vama.app and Utsav also offer similar offerings.
However, with 30 million downloads since 2020, the Sri Mandir app 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 downloads) are the most downloaded global Hindu devotional apps since 2020, according to Sensor Tower.
However, Sri Mandir lags far behind globally in the most downloaded religious apps. According to Sensor Tower, YouVersion Bible (274 million downloads), Muslim Pro (132 million downloads), and King James Bible (122 million downloads) have been the top three religious apps since 2014.
In India, Bible App for Kids (22 million downloads) and Muslim Pro (10 million downloads) are two of the most downloaded religious apps – both after Sri Mandir.
On the revenue side, Hallow Prayer & Meditation is the world’s top-grossing app since 2020, with consumers spending more than $84 million on in-app purchases, according to Sensor Tower. Sri Mandir, on the other hand, has generated less than $100,000 from in-app purchases since 2020, according to Sensor Tower.
This is lower than the No. 1 worship app in India by consumer spend, Joseph Prince Gospel Partner, which has generated over $300,000 in in-app purchases in India since 2020.
Next: Religious Tourism
In its latest funding round, AppsForBharat plans to add features with the aim of capturing 5% to 10% of what it believes is a potential $50 billion market.
Among them is religious tourism through Sri Mandir.
The startup plans to help users plan visits to temples and pilgrimage sites through its platform, in part by partnering with traditional travel companies, Sachan told TechCrunch. Pilot religious tourism projects have already begun with a select group of devotees, the CEO said.
The app will also facilitate obtaining special tickets for visiting holy shrines, offering food to idols and related religious goods.
Additionally, the startup plans to build a “complex technology stack” with a CRM-like experience for temples and historical sites in India. Sachan said these services will initially be available for free, but the company eventually plans to charge for managing these services.
The startup also plans to expand its network of temples 10-fold, to 500, over the next 12 to 18 months.
The company’s Series B funding round saw participation from Susquehanna Asia VC, in addition to AppsForBharat’s existing investors: Elevation Capital, Mirae Asset VC, and Peak XV.