iWorld
Mitron raises $ 5 mn led by Nexus Venture Partners
KOLKATA: Homegrown short-form video app Mitron has announced it raised $ 5 million, led by Nexus Venture Partners. 3one4 Capital and Arun Tadanki’s private syndicate on LetsVenture also participated in the latest round.
Mitron app is a short-form social video app that allows users to create, upload, view, and share entertaining short videos. Mitron is founded by Shivank Agarwal (alumnus of IIT Roorkee) and Anish Khandelwal (alumnus of Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology). Both the founders are Computer Science engineers and earlier worked together at MakeMyTrip.
The latest round of financing saw participation from stellar angels including Deep Kalra (Chairman, MakeMyTrip), Amrish Rau (CEO, Pine Labs),Jiten Gupta (Founder, Jupiter), Amarjit Batra (MD, Spotify India), Anand Chandrasekharan (Former Facebook, Snapdeal executive),Karan Bajwa (MD, Google Cloud, India),Radhika Ghai (Co-founder, Shopclues), Vikalp Sahni (Co-Founder and Ex-CTO at GoIbibo and Volunteer Architect at AarogyaSetu) and Shanti Mohan (Founder, LetsVenture).TK Kurien (Premji Invest),Manish Vij & Harish Bahl (Smile Group) also participated in their individual capacity.
The company will use the new infusion of capital to accelerate its product development to increase user engagement and hire high quality talent. The company also plans to onboard a wide network of Indian content creators on the app and invest in building Mitron brand.
Mitron founder and CEO Shivank Agarwal said, “We are thrilled to have Nexus Venture Partners join us in this journey, bringing in deep expertise of helping their portfolio companies build great products. We are committed to building Mitron as a world-class product that is designed for Indian users, by reimagining digital entertainment and engagement.
With more than 33 million downloads on Play Store and nine billion video views per month, Mitron has emerged as the popular choice among Indians for short-form video. We are thankful to our users for their love for Mitron”
Mitron app was launched in Apr 2020 and achieved the 10 million download milestone even before the unprecedented ban on Chinese apps.
Commenting on their decision to invest in Mitron, Pratik Poddar, Principal at Nexus Venture Partners said "Shivank and Anish are product-first, deep-tech and very iterative entrepreneurs. We have been tracking them for 3 months and loved the way they have evolved their thinking around content creation, community management and video delivery. We love backing ‘product and tech-first’ entrepreneurs. We believe eventually the best product with long term thinking will win. Focus is to create a high engagement and high retention community. Then only you can be long term partners for creators."
Anish Khandelwal, Founder & CTO, said "We have been rapidly improving our product experience and with this funding round, we plan to invest further in hiring top notch product & engineering talent that will help us build a world-class platform that can scale seamlessly”.
Anurag Ramdasan, Head of Investments at 3one4 Capital, said, “Shivank and Anish have built an impressive product together that we decided to back when they had just launched on the Play Store. Since then, the growth of the product as well as the team has been inspiring. The differentiated, long term thinking demonstrated by the founding team has led us to continue believing in them. We are excited to continue our work with the company to help build the next evolution of video engagement out of India”
Arun Tadanki said, “Mitron has been making rapid progress in establishing itself as the primary choice in the short-form video space and therefore, we are doubling down on our investment”
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eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
