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Venture capital firm SAIF Partners, which has over $4 billion under management, has invested $1.35 million in ShareChat — a social-content discovery and sharing platform.
The capital infusion is part of ShareChat’s seed round of funding, which also involved participation from India Quotient. The start-up is already in talks to raise Series A round of $7 million with domestic and international investors.
Started by three IIT-Kanpur alumni, Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh and Ankush Sachdeva, in October 2015, ShareChat has built a social-networking platform for India’s regional language users, available in four languages — Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and Telugu.
The app has already crossed 1.3 million downloads and at half a million monthly active users, has been growing at 10 per cent week-on-week. “We are using the funds to strengthen our technology to serve the growing volumes of traffic on ShareChat; expand into more languages and content types such as news, jokes, videos, health tips, exam updates, government job updates, food recipes and satire. Last month alone, we added 4,00,000 users,” Ahsan, CEO, ShareChat told BusinessLine .
Google LaunchpadShareChat was one of the six Indian start-ups that made it to the second batch of Google’s global Launchpad Accelerator programme in California last month, receiving $50,000 in equity-free funding, a two-week, all expenses paid boot camp and six months of ongoing mentorship and Google product credits.
The app currently allows users to search for other users, follow each other, create and find content in their preferred language, and share it to chat platforms such as WhatsApp. The start-up will be introducing chat and comments by mid-August.
Asked about the monetisation model, Ahsan said: “Right now, we are focused on building user engagement on ShareChat to make it a habit-forming product, after which we can generate recurring revenues. Facebook monetised its platform only after it crossed 250 million users.”
Mayank Khanduja, Principal, SAIF Partners, said: “We’re very confident about team ShareChat’s understanding of what we see as a massive market opportunity. The platform is powerful enough to solve the content and social-networking needs of the growing base of Indian smartphone users.”
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