While living in the U.S., the Trivedi family was looking for a customary way to worship at one of India's jyotirlingas, which symbolize the Hindu god Shiva. One Sunday in 2023, after searching YouTube for ways to make ritual offerings of flowers and other items at Indian temples, the family came across a video on an emerging devotional app called Sri Mandir.
The app provides customized videos of ritual prayers from over 50 Hindu temples across India and allows users to virtually join in prayers, make donations and access religious content from their iPhone or Android smartphone. It was just what the Trivedi family wanted.
Nearly a year later, the Trivedi family is still using Sri Mandir. A family member told TechCrunch that the app gives users access to local temples and monks, even if they live far from their home country, and helps them offer last-minute prayers and donate to their favorite temples. But it's pretty pricey: The average monthly spend on Sri Mandir outside India is $100.
“Sri Mandir is a super premium app and not for everyone on a budget as it costs a lot just to convert rupees to dollars,” said a user.
The app fills a growing need: Hindus around the world often visit temples of their beloved gods and goddesses as part of their long-standing rituals, making donations and participating in prayers for peace, happiness and better relationships. But in India, access to religious services and information has been largely offline and unstructured.
Prashant Sachan, a serial entrepreneur from a village near Kanpur, an industrial city in Uttar Pradesh, and a former co-founder of social commerce startup Trell, founded Appsfor Bharat, Sri Mandir's parent company, in November 2020. He had seen rural India also starting to come online, but he realised that religious practices in the country remained largely offline.
“When I started the experiment, dedication was one of the actions I started thinking about because I thought it deserved attention that it hadn't gotten before,” Sachan said in an interview.
Image credit: AppsForBharat
The three-year-old app has been downloaded more than 30 million times since 2020, and only opened up access to markets outside India in January. Since then, Sachan told TechCrunch that the app has grown 25-30% month-on-month, garnering 500,000 registered users and 2.5 million installs outside India. Most of its global users are from the US, followed by Canada, the UK, and the Middle East.
Sachan said the main audience for Sri Mandir outside of India are first- and second-generation Indian Americans who don't often visit temples in India but want to connect with their roots.
This global expansion has enabled Sri Mandir to scale its revenue, which comes from microtransactions generated when users pray or donate through the app. Currently, 25% of Sri Mandir's total revenue comes from outside India.
Sri Mandir not only enables users to connect with the temples they worship but also helps the monks at the temples gain more followers and ultimately earn more. By spending five to six hours a week on the app, monks can typically earn around 25 to 30 percent more than their regular income from their day jobs.
Manoj, a priest at the Trimbakeshwar Shiva Temple in the town of Trimbak in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, told TechCrunch that Sri Mandir will also be useful for devotees who are not in good physical health but still want to participate in prayers occasionally.
A monk meets 40-50 devotees through the Sri Mandir app every week. The app also helps the monks collect more fees from devotees, Manoj noted. The app charges individual users even for group prayers, but groups that visit the temple in person may not all pay individually. But Manoj acknowledged that the app lacks the sacred atmosphere people get when they actually come to the temple. He likened this to the difference between taking medicine at home and getting full treatment in a hospital.
AppsForBharat wants to help Sri Mandir reach an even larger audience. The Bengaluru-based startup has raised $18 million in a Series B round led by Indian billionaire and tech veteran Nandan Nilekani's Fundamentum Partnership.
Most Downloaded Apps Among Hindus
Sri Mandir is not alone in the Indian religious app market: DevDham, Vama.app and Utsav also offer similar services.
Still, with 30 million downloads since 2020, Sri Mandir is the only Hindu-specific app among the top 100 most downloaded religious apps globally, according to Sensor Tower data provided exclusively to TechCrunch.
Image credit: Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch
According to Sensor Tower, the most downloaded Hindu devotional apps since 2020 are the Hindi versions of “Bhagavad Gita” (2 million downloads) and “Sanatan” (2 million downloads).
That said, Sri Mandir lags far behind when it comes to the most downloaded prayer apps globally: According to Sensor Tower, the top three prayer apps since 2014 have been YouVersion Bible App (274 million downloads), Muslim Pro (132 million downloads), and King James Bible (122 million downloads).
In India, Bible App for Kids (22 million downloads) and Muslim Pro (10 million downloads) are the two most downloaded religious apps after Sri Mandir.
In terms of revenue, Hallow Prayer & Meditation is the highest grossing app in the world since 2020, with consumers spending over $84 million on in-app purchases, according to Sensor Tower. Meanwhile, Sri Mandir has earned less than $100,000 in in-app purchases since 2020, according to Sensor Tower.
This is lower than the number one prayer app by consumer spending in India, the Joseph Prince Gospel Partners app, which has received over $300,000 in in-app purchases in India since 2020.
Next up: religious tourism
With its latest funding round, AppsForBharat plans to add features with the goal of capturing 5% to 10% of what it believes to be a potential market of $50 billion.
One of them is religious tourism through Sri Mandir.
Sachan told TechCrunch that the startup plans to help users plan visits to temples and pilgrimage sites through its platform, possibly through partnerships with traditional travel aggregators. A pilot project for religious tourism has already begun with some believers, he said.
The app also provides special tickets for visiting sacred shrines and delivering prasad (food offered to idols) and associated devotional items.
Additionally, the startup plans to build a “complex tech stack” to provide a CRM-like experience for temples and historical sites in India. These services will be offered free of charge initially, but the company will eventually charge a management fee for the services, Sachan said.
The startup plans to expand its temple network tenfold to 500 temples within the next 12 to 18 months.
The company's all-equity Series B round was led by Susquehanna Asia VC, along with AppsForBharat's existing investors Elevation Capital, Mirae Asset VC and Peak XV.