It’s Tuesday and today we’re diving into Utsav, a spiritual and devotion app which recently closed a $750,000 pre-Series A round led by Equanimity Investments with participation from India Quotient.

Before we start, I want to define several terms that may be unfamiliar to non-Indians such as myself:

With that out of the way, what is Utsav?

It’s an app that lets you perform religious rituals from the comfort of your home, no temple visit required. Maybe you don’t have the time, maybe the temple you want is too far—either way, Utsav steps in.

Here’s how it works:

That’s pretty much it. As of now, Utsav has onboarded 50+ temples and completed over 60,000 orders.

The company believes strongly that if religious rituals are to appeal to younger generations, they have to be accessible online. While many Tier 1 temples already offer online services, Utsav is focusing on Tier 2 temples that don’t.

You can think of Utsav and the temple as backend and frontend for puja. Utsav handles the tech—booking, payments, livestreams, delivery of prasad. The temple handles the ritual: provides the pandit, performs the puja, and packs the prasad.

Both Utsav and the temple make money in two ways:

Indians are deeply religious—97% identify as believers, and about 80% are Hindu. That’s over 600 million people in 2011, and likely 800 million by 2050. Just Hindus alone would make up the second-largest “country” in the world.

But more importantly, the Hindu population tends to have a strong attachment to its religious identity.

According to Pew, 98% of Hindus go to temples at least sometimes, 84% say religion is very important to them, 75% are knowledgeable about their religion, and 59% pray daily. Also, 64% believe Hinduism is an essential part of being truly Indian.

So we’ve established that Hinduism is important to a massive number of people.

Hinduism is also incredibly diverse. There are many denominations, rituals, and deities.

Three denominations each have over 100 million followers. In different regions, people feel closer to different deities. The number of Hindu deities is said to exceed 330 million. There are nearly 650,000 temples across the country.

And it’s not just pujas. There are samskaras (16 life events), yajnas (fire offerings), and more. Diwali is the most well-known, but there are two dozen major festivals.x`

When you have a huge, devoted user base—and the “product” (in this case, religion) has infinite depth—you’ve got a major business opportunity.

Some estimates peg India’s religious and spiritual market at $58.6 billion in 2023, with projections to double by 2032. Even if the number is off by a margin, it’s still massive.

The pandemic forced people to skip temple visits—and remember, 98% do go to temples—so the faith-app space boomed. It hit over $50M in 2024. There are 1,013 faith-based startups, 52 of which have raised funding. Many offer astrology, but a good chunk do pujas and other rituals.

Since ReligiousTech in India is booming, Utsav’s competition is growing.The team openly admits it’s hard to stand out. Temples aren’t exclusive to one platform, so differentiation mostly comes down to experience. For instance, Utsav delivers prasad from the actual temple, while some others ship it from a warehouse. But it’s hard to choose a product because of the experience before you’ve tried said product.

I’m a big believer in true differentiation, except in huge, fast-growing markets with low penetration. Not that it’s bad, but you just don’t need it to succeed. In those cases, there’s enough demand for multiple winners. That’s where Utsav is now. But long term, it’ll need to find new ways to stand apart.

71% of Hindus visit temples at least once a week. The question is—are these folks so religious that they’ll embrace virtual rituals, or so religious that they won’t?

This is one of the biggest unknowns, not just for Utsav but for the entire space. How the most devout perceive online rituals will determine a lot.

So far, Utsav has onboarded fewer than 0.1% of temples. There’s a long road ahead. And temples might not be easy to convince—they may see virtual rituals as inauthentic or even as a threat to in-person donations. I would assume that willingness to pay online vs. offline is not the same.

A puja isn’t something most people do daily. So usage is occasional, and that limits how much Utsav can charge per user—for now.

There are so many ways Utsav can grow—both virtually and physically:

They’re already planning an e-commerce push, and the runway for new products feels endless.

Utsav has also talked about going international—which makes total sense. There are over 32 million Indians living abroad, and not all of them have a temple nearby.

Rough estimate: in India, there’s one temple per 1,000 people, in Sydney it’s close to one per 8,000. And Sydney is probably on the high side thanks to a large, wealthy diaspora and government support for temple construction.

Few products are recurring, lifelong, and essential. Utsav’s could be. If someone starts using it now, they might still be using it 30 years from now.

As customer lifetimes become clearer, Utsav can start investing more confidently in acquisition. Right now, they need to be careful with marketing spend. But eventually, LTV might make that spend irrelevant.

I have some skepticism that VR will become a thing. But if it does, Utsav’s value could easily 5–10x. Watching a screen and being in a temple are very different experiences—and VR closes that gap in a massive way.

When they say there’s an app for that, it’s literally true. I wonder—is there a massive consumer-facing market that hasn’t been digitized yet?

Also, when you think about it, there aren’t actually that many industries targeting consumers while expecting, at least to some degree, a lifelong commitment. Even if you’re a devoted Apple fan, if Apple misses on the next generation of devices, you’ll switch to another brand.

Obviously, you can change the app, but the underlying product (religion) never changes, which significantly simplifies the provider’s task.