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ShareChat has closed $40 million in pre-series E round of funding led by Pawan Munjal and Ajay Shridhar Shriram.
Twitter previously led ShareChat’s Series D funding round with additional backing by SAIF Partners, Lightspeed Ventures and India Quotient, three of whom have been involved with ShareChat as investors since its early days.
Pawan Munjal, CEO & Chairman of Hero MotoCorp, has joined them and has invested in his personal capacity through his family Trust. Similarly, Ajay Shridhar Shriram, Chairman of DCM Shriram, has invested through DCM Shriram Promoter’s family office. This current round of funding will be utilised towards driving growth for Moj, the newly-launched short video platform from ShareChat, the company said.
$264-million funding
With the new round, ShareChat’s total funding is $264 million. Home-grown companies are seeing a surge in demand after the recent decision by the government to ban Chinese apps.
Also read: ShareChat issues $14 million more in ESOPs
Munjal said that India’s IT industry has made an indelible impact on the global economy in the recent decades and now India’s new age start-ups are building on the existing resources to reach the next growth stage. “The economic and demographic ecosystem of the internet universe is primed for companies like ShareChat and their products,” he said.
Further, large parts of the fund have been earmarked for doubling down on investments made towards product development, growing its creator ecosystem and establishing partnerships with music labels.
Also read: ShareChat acquires video production company HPF Films
ShareChat and Moj together have over 240 million monthly active users (MAUs) presently. ShareChat itself has exceeded over 160 million MAUs in the past month with the average daily time spent by users on the platform at 31 minutes. While Moj has garnered over 80 million MAUs with users spending on an average about 34 minutes on the platform.
Short-video platform
Ankush Sachdeva, CEO & Co-Founder, ShareChat, said: “ShareChat is on a rapid growth path and is spearheading the growth of the Indic language Indian social media landscape. Our short-video platform Moj has been on an explosive growth trajectory since its launch. This funding will help us further invest into our product development, ML capabilities and helping the creator community.”
Mayank Khanduja, Partner, SAIF Partners, is of the view that as an investor it took the right call at a time when there were not many examples of Indian social media platforms.
Dev Khare, Partner, Lightspeed India, said: “We are excited to deepen our partnership with ShareChat, continuing our support in every financing round since leading their Series A. The company’s India-first brand and capabilities in local languages, product innovation, AI, growth and retention are deep moats.”
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