Spiritual and devotional platform Vama has raised INR 22 crore ($2.5 million) in a pre-Series A funding round, led by its existing investor Wavemaker Partners.
Other investors in the round include 500 Global, Sadev Ventures, Venture Catalysts, Silverneedle Ventures, and several angel investors.
Notable angel investors are Alok Nanavaty (Centrum International Services), Harit Nagpal (Tata Play), Swati Parikh, and Mahesh Kamdar.
Vama will use the funding to grow into new areas like e-commerce and offline spiritual tourism. It will also improve its products and invest in marketing.
“We are seeing strong demand from people who say they want to visit temples and perform puja. So we will start facilitating such trips and expand into offline travel, as we are extremely bullish on that. The target is to launch in at least two cities within this calendar year”, said, Manu Jain, cofounder of Vama.
“Chadhava (an offering made to a deity), as a service, has been growing very well for us. It’s been one of our biggest revenue drivers, and the content experiments are also gaining traction,” said Jain.
Vishal Harnal, managing partner at 500 Global, said, “Faith and spirituality are universal needs, and Vama.app has shown the ability to digitise this space with both integrity and scale”.
“We’re doubling down on Vama.app as the platform continues to delight customers and sustain retention,” said Phuong Tran, investment principal at Wavemaker Partners.
VAMA, founded in 2020 by Manu Jain and Aacharya Dev in New Delhi, offers e-pujas, e-darshans, and astrology services to devotees across India.
By June, the platform had completed over 500,000 e-pujas and e-chadavas and expanded to more than 20 tier I and II cities.
VAMA’s revenue doubled to ₹19.5 crore in FY24, and the company expects it to double again in FY25. It has stayed consistently profitable at the contribution margin level, with margins above 10%, and aims to achieve full EBITDA profitability as it grows.
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