TikTok remains banned in India, and some of the rival short-form video services there are enjoying their moment in the sun as a result. One of them, Roposo, has given some startling figures to Bloomberg on its growth in the wake of the ban.
“It’s peaking at 500,000 new users an hour and expects to have 100 million by month’s end. That’s almost double the 55 million it had before the ban,” explained the report, which also quotes Naveen Tewari, CEO of Roposo’s parent company InMobi: “It was a rocket ship instant for the country’s app startups.”
The story is also a good refresher on Roposo’s recent history. Originally founded by three graduates from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, it grew to 42 million users before being acquired by Glance, the maker of a popular app showing news and content on people’s smartphone lock-screens.
Glance is a subsidiary of mobile advertising group InMobi, and shortly before buying Roposo raised a $45m funding round from Mithril Capital, the VC firm co-founded by Silicon Valley veteran Peter Thiel.
It’s not just Roposo benefitting from TikTok’s troubles though: another Indian short-form video app, Chingari, has grown from 3.5 million users to 17.5 million since the ban was announced.
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