Dhingana raises $7M in Series B funding from Lightspeed, Helion & Inventus Capital

Social music streaming site Dhingana has raised $7 million in Series B round of funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Existing investors Inventus Capital Partners and Helion Venture Partners also participated in the round. As part of the deal, Dev Khare from Lightspeed will join the board of the company.

Snehal Shinde, co-founder and CEO of Dhingana, said, "We plan to use the current funding to build the team and expand our marketing, sales and business development efforts further."

Dhingana was set up in February 2007 by twin brothers Snehal and Swapnil Shinde. It currently features a collection of over 5 lakh free songs in 35 genres, available across different platforms and devices, such as iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Symbian, as well as PCs and laptops. It claims to be the largest on-demand Bollywood and Indian music streaming service across the globe with 15 million active visitors a month.

Headquartered in California, Dhingana also has an office in Pune. It had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Inventus Capital Partners and Helion Venture Partners in 2011. .

"We are impressed with the level of product execution and the audience growth at Dhingana. We believe that a country as large and diverse as India supports a world-class, branded music service tuned to the needs of its increasingly mobile-centric population," said Khare of Lightspeed.

The company has recently appointed Ashish Joshi as vice-president, business development. It has also branched out from the niche of Indian music by obtaining its first licensing deal with an American artist and the label, Pretty Lights Music.

Earlier this year, Dhingana launched an advertising platform to help brands reach out to its listener base across the globe. As part of this initiative, the company named Gokul Rajaram, Facebook's product director of advertising and creator of Google's AdSense, to its advisory board. Prior to that, Dhingana was integrated with the Facebook Timeline, allowing people to share their music with friends and discover new songs via their Timelines on Facebook.

Dhingana competes with other music streaming sites like US-based Saavn and Times Internet-backed Gaana.com.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)