Online puja booking service Muhurtmaza has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from a US based HNI investor, said Co-Founder, Sughosh Sowale.

Set up in Pune in late 2014, Muhurtmaza allows customers to book a priest online, depending on what specific ritual they would like to conduct, as well as the things (samagri) required to conduct the ritual. Sowale told that the funds raised would be used towards scaling up its presence and promotional activities. “We currently have 300 pandits on our platform and the plan is to scale this up to 600 by January.”

He added that they were the first company in this space to have received funding so far. According to various estimates, this market segment is pegged at about $30bn and is almost entirely unorganized. Startups like this function as a marketplace, connecting customers to priests and pandits depending on the kind of ritual that needs to be performed.

Muhurtmaza currently operates in Pune, Bengaluru and Hyderabad among a few other cities, and will focus on increasing consumer awareness and strengthening its supply chain over the next few months.

Sowale said that the company has set up various partnerships to drive awareness and bookings on its platforms, through marriage halls and large societies. In Pune, it has tied up with a few builders on their upcoming projects.

These builders hand over a Muhurtmaza discount coupon while giving possession of the flat to the new home owners, and quite a few of these people have used Muhurtmaza to conduct the housewarming puja. He said that people living on the outskirts and newer residential areas is where most of the demand was coming from, given that they typically were out of towners and didn’t have a family priest to conduct these rituals.

Source: Economic Times

Image Courtesy: Muhurtmaza