Social music streaming service Dhingana (www.dhingana.com) today announced it has closed $7 million in a Series B round funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The fund raising also saw participation from its Series A investors Inventus Capital Partners and Helion Venture Partner.
Dhingana has 15 million monthly active visitors worldwide. 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.
“India is one of the world’s largest markets and has a unique culture with its music enjoyed throughout the world. 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,” commented Snehal Shinde, Co-founder and CEO of Dhingana.
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 John Dougery, Managing Director, Inventus Capital Partners.
Dhingana was launched in 2007 and has since become the largest on-demand music service in India, with millions of users in over 220 countries/territories.
