This WedTech startup by two IIT-Kanpur grads wants to simplify wedding planning

Founded in 2022, Meharchandani started VivaHit with Aman Kumar, who is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at the Bengaluru-based startup. The IIT-Kanpur graduates had previously worked with ShareChat before seriously giving a shot at the WedTech platform.

Meharchandani says WedTech in India is either a matchmaking business or a wedding business where you match with vendors like booking a banquet hall or a bridal makeup artist. But there has been no specialised tech platform that takes care of guest management, and that’s where VivaHit comes in.

‘Amalgamation of wedding and tech’

The wedding business is estimated to be worth a $50 billion industry in India. According to Meharchandani, India witnesses 1.3 to 1.4 crore weddings every year, and out of them, 80 to 90 per cent of the budget is spent on jewellery and clothing, while the remaining 10 per cent goes toward guest experience and their management.

However, as you move up the social ladder, what changes is the ratio of jewellery and clothing that you gift to the bride or your guests; this proportion decreases even though the absolute value increases. “As you move up the scale, the percentage of how much you spend on guest engagement and guest memorability of the wedding goes up, rather than spending on other parts of the wedding,” Meharchandani tells indianexpress.com in an interview.

The task of the hosts becomes tedious when they need to follow up with guests and keep reminding them about the logistics and travel if they plan to attend the wedding. (Image credit: VivaHit screenshot)

“Weddings are a significant element of flaunting, especially in the higher strata. With these large-scale weddings, people want to engage more with their guests,” he said, noting that a few years ago, pre-wedding photo shoots were not a common concept, but now it’s everywhere.

“Weddings are a two-day affair, and larger weddings can even span three days, four days, or even a week. So, elements are being added to weddings simply because people want their weddings to stand out, and the recall value is lower.”

Meharchandani describes WedTech as an “amalgamation of wedding and tech”. The concept has been there in the US and Europe for a very long time, but in India, WedTech has so far remained synonymous with matrimonial sites and wedding planning marketplaces.

Meharchandani has made it clear they are neither a competitor to Shaadi.com, which is in the matchmaking business, nor trying to be a marketplace for services like hiring a makeup artist or a mehendi wala. They are also very distinct from traditional channels established in India for decades.

“You only do weddings with the people you already know because this is a one-time showoff event of your life when you’re spending that amount on your wedding. Maybe you check the internet to see the reviews of four or five banquet halls, but you don’t book it from there. We [Indians] like to experience things and don’t mind going out to check ten different banquet halls on the weekend,” he says.

“We realised that there are a lot of smaller problems in weddings, and we are trying to solve the guest management problem at weddings,” he said.

Typically, people send wedding invites on WhatsApp and maintain an Excel sheet. The task of the hosts becomes tedious when they need to follow up with guests and keep reminding them about the logistics and travel if they plan to attend the wedding.

“Guest management is a problem across the board, and it is not addressed the way Indians think about it. In the US or European countries, it is considered rude if you do not respond to an RSVP, but here in India, we constantly need to remind guests to confirm their attendance,” explains Meharchandani.

Kumar (left) and Meharchandani (right) are both from IIT-Kanpur. (Image credit: Hemant Meharchandani)

Enhancing wedding engagement

With the VivaHit app, which is already available on the Google Play and the Apple App stores, you can add guests, invite your guests, track RSVPs, and send and update reminders.

It’s a tool that helps you organise and stay on track with a checklist, maintain guest lists, and send wedding cards all from one place. For example, if you want to invite your friends for a cocktail party and the wedding, and your closest relatives for sangeet, mehendi, and the wedding day, you don’t need to create multiple invitation cards. All you need to do is select the event and the people you want to invite, and the card will automatically be sent for that event.

Another feature of the app is the easy uploading of an Excel sheet that contains the list of guests and keeps track of vehicle and hotel room numbers in one place. Then there is an AI-enabled photo scan feature. Essentially, guests who are on the platform can scan their faces, and they will receive all their photographs from the wedding. This happens after the photographer uploads the photos.

Meharchandani says he’s trying to build a platform to enhance the wedding engagement. “Our plan is that when you trigger an invite from our platform, the engagement should begin 30 days or 50 days before, or wherever you start sending that invite out,” he said.

That’s where the VivaHit platform comes in, from sharing a pre-wedding photoshoot to perhaps a game of antakshari between the bride and groom’s families.

The app is free for certain features but more advanced features are chargeable. There are three packages which start from Rs 2,500 and go up to Rs 10,000. This is how the platform will make money to get running.

Right now, the guest management organiser is live on the app which includes RSVP creation, AI-enabled photo collection, and even having your wedding website but the plan is also to add audio chat, live streaming, and more advanced features in the coming months.

Marrying services and AI

Since the platform went live a few months ago, the app has seen 6,000 downloads, with 3,000 to 4,000 weddings having been registered. However, Meharchandani and the team’s biggest challenge is attracting users to paid weddings.

He attributes the slow interest in paid weddings to the seasonality of weddings in India and the fact that the platform itself is so new. “People don’t want to experiment with a half-baked product, especially when it comes to weddings,” he says, adding that the incubation time for his platform is much longer than any other product.

Meharchandani says the VivaHit app went through several iterations before the current version went live. The team consulted at least 50 people in the wedding business to develop the platform.

In fact, Meharchandani initially created a B2B app but stopped working on it after realising the barriers to entry if you do not belong to the inner circle and the resistance to change from people with a traditional mindset in the wedding business.

For now, to gain initial traction, Meharchandani and his team are working with a few photographers and banquet halls.

In the future, Meharchandani may explore the services side but says it would be completely AI-driven. Based on a simple prompt, users will be able to visualise the venue and its layout, and based on that, they will receive filtered tasks from planning to execution with the option to choose suggested vendors. But to develop such AI-based features, Meharchandani says requires a lot of data.

VivaHit has raised $5,30,000 at a $4 million valuation earlier this year from institutional investors like All In Capital, Suashish Family, and some other angel investors.

“We believe that five years down the line, digital weddings will be a trend, and people will have a wedding app and a website, and guests will engage online as much as they like to do it offline,” says Meharchandani.