Bangalore-based Mango Man Consumer Electronics Picks Up $1.75M From Sequoia And India Quotient Fund

Mango Man Consumer Electronics, a Bangalore-based startup that makes home entertainment hardware, has scooped up $1.75 million in seed funding from Sequoia Capital and India Quotient Fund.

Along with its angel funding, this brings Mango Man’s total raised so far to almost $2 million. Mango Man will use its latest capital to enhance its current product lineup, develop new hardware to be launched later this year, and expand internationally, with Southeast Asia as an initial target.

The company was founded in 2013 by Sai Srinivas Kiran G and Shubh Malhotra and currently has a team of 22 people.

“The initial idea was to build something that would enable a user to play anything from anywhere on their televisions. This started with Teewe, and then our mission statement went on to include building more devices that will reimagine connected home entertainment,” Srinivas tells TechCrunch.

Teewe, a HDMI dongle, is Mango Man’s current flagship product, which lets users connect their computers and mobile devices to a television, and is compatible with Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Chrome.

Of course, there are already several HDMI dongles available, including Google Chromecast, which has been available in India since December. Srinivas says Teewe differentiates from Chromecast by making it easier for users to stream content to their televisions that they have already downloaded onto their PCs or mobile devices.

“Our focus is primarily on enabling users to watch content that they already have, instead of online streaming content because of the not-so-great Internet connection in India,” says Srinivas.

To use Teewe, users plug it into their television’s HDMI port, then download its apps onto their PCs, tablets, or smartphones. Teewe’s app automatically finds, and sorts all media stored on those devices that can be played through Teewe. Teewe also has a Chrome plug-in that automatically sorts playable content from websites.

Though Chromecast is a competitor, Srinivas says sales of Teewe actually increased after Google’s device launched in India, because it increased awareness of HDMI dongles among consumers there.

The next product Mango Man is developing is focused on streaming music and home audio and will launch this summer. The company is also working on another connected home entertainment device, slated to arrive on the market at the end of this year.

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