Homegrown regional language social media platform ShareChat has raised $502 million from investors like Tiger Global, Lightspeed, Snap, Twitter and others, which has propelled its valuation to $2.1 billion. Sharechat co-founder Ankush Sachdeva took to Twitter to announce that the latest funding will help the company build "India's largest AI-powered" content ecosystem.
"Excited to share that we have raised $502mn at $2.1 bn valuation from Tiger Global, Lightspeed, Snap, Twitter and others. This capital will help us accelerate our journey of building India's largest AI-powered content ecosystem. We are thankful to all our existing and new investors for their support," Sachdeva posted on Twitter confirming the news.
ShareChat was launched in January 2015, with a simple motto of finding trending content in Indian languages with a baked-in viral loop. Over the years, ShareChat has evolved to become India's largest regional social media platform.
ShareChat has close to 160 million active monthly users. The platform is available in 15 local languages including Tamil, Assamese, Bengali, Malayalam, among others. Recently, ShareChat also launched a TikTok-like video format app called Mauj. Mauj's monthly active subscribers have now crossed 120 million within a span of nine months.
Sachdeva said on both ShareChat & Moj, the content consumption is driven through an AI-powered content feed.
"We are at a significant inflection point in our company's journey - as the internet penetration further deepens in India we are well-positioned to expand our ecosystem of products to 1 Billion plus monthly active users cumulatively. We have seen how large the short-video market is in China - with around 80% of the entire Internet population using one of the short-video products(Douyin, Kuaishou etc) daily," Sachdeva said in a post.
Also read: ShareChat's Moj first Indian company to partner with Snap for Snapchat camera