Earlier this week, India’s regional social media platform ‘ShareChat’ raised a $100 million in its Series D funding with micro-blogging site Twitter & equity firm TrustBridge being its newest investors. ShareChat’s existing investors include Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient & Morningside Venture Capital also participated in the funding round.
The ShareChat Twitter funding has now predictably turned the spotlight on this social network. Founded in 2015, this startup by Mohalla Tech has raised a total of $224 million, according to a statement released by them after receiving the latest round of funding.
“This new round of funding will help ShareChat strengthen the technology infrastructure for its platform as the company looks to scale its business. Additionally, ShareChat will acquire talent to help propel the exchange of ideas among its strategic partners,” the statement said.
The non-English social networking app is aimed at India’s vernacular language users. It allows users to share videos, jokes, GIFs, audio songs and funny images in 15 Indian languages including Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil & Kannada, among others.
Created by IIT alumni Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh & Ankush Sachdeva, the app has been downloaded over 100 million times, & it has 60 million active monthly users in India.
According to the startup team, there exists a totally different set of users which prefers expressing itself in Indian languages, but has had no platform. This audience was widely unaddressed & the market was almost untouched till ShareChat came into the picture.
ShareChat currently allows users to follow each other, create & find Content in their language of preference & share them on all possible chat platforms.
The app has services including daily horoscope, astrology in all Indian languages by birth date, news in Indian languages, love quotes, tips to dress well & how to prepare for interviews, health tips on how to cure yourself with home-made remedies, lose weight, religious quotes & even a dictionary.
It was in 2014 that Sachdeva, Singh & Ahsan got the idea of building a debate platform by looking at the kind of discussions people were having on Facebook groups. Cricket & movie stars were identified as the most popular conversation subjects. The trio then created WhatsApp groups & aggressively posted links to those groups on Facebook to attract users.
They later built chatbots to allow users to discover different genres of jokes, food recipes, & other similar services, but soon moved on from chatbots & created an app where users could easily produce, discover & share Content in the languages they understand.
A year later, ShareChat was launched, & soon become the most popular networking platform in regional languages.
ShareChat is headquartered in Bangalore, India & has scores of users in Bangladesh, Nepal & the Middle East, where many users speak Indian regional languages. The startup, however, is planning to expanding its user base in India & is hoping to double it in the next one year. The new funding sure will help in that.
Image Credit: ShareChat
