ShareChat is the largest Indian social networking site, allowing users to express their thoughts, chronicle their life, and meet new people in their local language. ShareChat, which is spearheading India’s internet revolution, is altering the way the next billion users will engage with the internet. It enables language-first internet users to connect and express their creativity. The platform is supported by engineering, data science, design, business & strategy, and content operations teams.
It is developed by Bangalore-based Mohalla Tech Pvt Ltd. It was founded by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan, and incorporated on 8 January 2015. ShareChat has over 180 million monthly active users across 15 Indic languages. The company’s software includes private messaging, tagging, and a personal messaging function, allowing users to exchange movies, jokes, music, sharechat good morning messages, status videos, and other language-based social material with unknown people.
Beginning of Journey
In 2015, three IIT Kanpur grads, Ankush Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan, and Bhanu Pratap Singh, launched ShareChat. The trio met at a Yahoo Hackathon and embarked on their adventure, driven by a desire to create goods for India. Their research and development continued until they created their 14th product, ShareChat.
They stumbled upon a Facebook post with a WhatsApp logo and a few photos of Indian cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar while working on their last project, Opinio, a debate platform. “Agar aapko Sachin ke WhatsApp group mein aana hai, toh apna phone number daal dijiye,” the message stated in Hindi. (If you wish to join Sachin’s WhatsApp group, please leave your phone number here.)
The creators identified an interesting online pattern after reviewing the post and the profiles of the people who had provided their phone numbers. The majority of the users’ names were in symbols or initials, which was popular in the early days of social networking.
To expand on their experiment, they formed ten WhatsApp groups about Sachin Tendulkar, each with 100 members. Within minutes, these groups were inundated with various types of information, such as jokes, photographs, videos, and so on, and the biggest surprise was that the majority of the content was in the individuals’ native language. The trio saw that Indian users had a strong need for local content. This epiphany resulted in the development of ShareChat, India’s first social networking platform in Indian languages, which serves the next billion internet users.
Ban on Tiktok and launch of Moj
Following the Indian government’s ban on TikTok in June 2020, ShareChat released the comparable Moj app and expanded significantly.
Moj was released on June 29, 2020. In just two days, the app received over 50,000 downloads from the Google Play Store. Moj has reached 160 million downloads in the Google Play store in just 6 months as of now.
It has comparable characteristics as TikTok, such as special effects, short movies, emoticons, stickers, and so on. In addition, the Moj App supports 15 languages and allows users to download videos. The Moj short video app, like TikTok, allows users to post films of up to 15 seconds in length. The app includes filters and emoticons to assist the author improve the quality of their movies. The Moj App also allows users to lip-sync. However, the programme, like ShareChat, does not support the English language.
Investors
The Indian social network had raised $502 million in 2021 in a new financing round — Series E — led by Tiger Global that valued ShareChat at $2.1 billion, up from about $650 million in 2020 Snap and existing investors Twitter and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the round, said ShareChat, which has raised about $765 million to date.
Existing investors including smartphone maker Xiaomi and venture capital firms SAIF Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners also invested a significant amount.
It had also raised close to $100 Mn (INR 720 Cr) in a funding round that will boost its valuation to $460 Mn (INR 3,332 Cr). This is a 7x increase to its last valuation when the company raised $18.2 Mn in Series B funding round from Xiaomi Singapore and its sister company Shunwei Capital at a valuation of $67 Mn (INR 431 Cr) in January 2018.
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Profitability and Revenues are a long shot for Sharechat
If the company’s financials are examined, it becomes clear that creating a viable business out of a Bharat-focused Indian language social networking site is, at best, a long shot.
Even though ShareChat’s revenue for FY20 was INR 38.12 Cr, up 49 percent year on year (YoY) from INR 25.63 Cr in FY19, just over 25 percent of it came from operations. Operational revenue accounted for INR 9.38 Cr of total income, and this comes after the firm began monetising its platform in the fiscal year.
Where is ShareChat heading from here?
Twitter has only invested in one startup – that too, twice. It is said to be on the verge of receiving further funding from Google and Snapchat. At one point, Google was rumoured to be interested in acquiring ShareChat for a billion dollars.
So, where is ShareChat going next? The solution can be found at the startup’s new Palo Alto, California research facility. Though there is no word on prospective English-language support or U.S. market growth, the firm is keen to tap into the Bay Area’s talent pool as it considers its future.
ShareChat Labs, led by former Uber executive Gaurav Mishra, is to experiment with machine learning technologies to tackle the social network’s most urgent challenges, such as identifying NSFW material, hate speech, and fake news, as well as create infrastructure to support its next-generation products. Camera technology is one of the areas ShareChat is focusing on for providing recognisable social features such as augmented reality experiences, lenses, filters, stickers, live video streaming, and more for both ShareChat and Moj.
Over the last several years, ShareChat has acquired a fashion marketplace, a hyperlocal information service, a meme maker app, a video production and talent agency company for influencers, and more. They provide a very clear image of where it’s going: an all-encompassing social media network capable of challenging behemoths like Facebook on a larger scale.
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