Alibaba, a Chinese multinational conglomerate has reportedly infused around Rs 700 crore ($100 million) in a short-video sharing app VMate, reports Inc24. The funding has been done in an attempt to increase Alibaba’s foothold in the Indian market.
The video sharing app will use the funding to scale its business in India. VMate was launched by UC Web in India in 2016, the subsidiary of the Chinese tech giant.
VMate initially offered full-length movies to users but later shifted to user-generated short videos.
“Short videos will be one of the company’s top priorities this year,” UC Web said.
VMate offers several video making and editing tools like stickers, special effects, custom clips, and duet video format among others along with the ability to share videos to other platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and TikTok among others.
The app claims to currently have 30 million users in India.
While, Alibaba Group is based out of China which was founded in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma. Its businesses are comprised of core commerce, cloud computing, digital media and entertainment, and innovation initiatives.
Simultaneously, TikTok, the music video making and sharing app, owned by Bytedance, claims to have over 120 million users in India, and seems to be a major contender for VMate in India.
In March 2019, the company had said that short videos accounted for over 40% of overall content consumption on the platform, with more than 1 lakh short-videos being uploaded every day on its platform, while daily video consumption had increased three-fold on VMate.
Besides TikTok, other players in this segment include Like, Roposo, Kwai and Vigo Video.