Twitter-backed Indian social network ShareChat raises $40 million

The five-year-old Bangalore-based startup said Dr. Pawan Munjal, chief executive and chairman of giant two-wheeler manufacturer Hero MotoCorp, Ajay Shridhar Shriram, chairman of chemical manufacturing company DCM Shriram, and existing investors Twitter, SAIF Partners, Lightspeed Ventures and India Quotient financed the new round of capital.

Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder and chief executive of ShareChat, told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup’s new fundraise is part of its pre-Series E financing round. TechCrunch understands the startup is engaging with several major VC funds and corporate giants to raise more than $100 million in the next few months. ShareChat has raised about $264 million to date.

The new capital will help ShareChat better support creators on its platform, Sachdeva said. ShareChat launched the short-video app Moj in early July, days after New Delhi banned TikTok, which at the time had about 200 million users in India.

In the weeks following TikTok’s ban in India, scores of startups have launched short-video apps in the country. DailyHunt has launched Josh, and Times Internet’s MX Player has launched TakaTak. But Moj has clearly established dominance¹ among short-form video apps.

ShareChat said Moj has amassed more than 80 million monthly active users, who are spending about 34 minutes on the platform each day.

ShareChat’s marquee and eponymous app, which caters to users in 15 Indian languages, itself has grown “exponentially.” The app has amassed 160 million monthly active users ², up from 60 million during the same period last year. A user on an average spends about 31 minutes on the app each day, the startup said.

“ShareChat has grown phenomenally this calendar year,” said Sachdeva. The growth of ShareChat in the social media category is a rare success story for the Indian startup ecosystem.

“India could never have dreamt of having a homegrown social media platform, had ShareChat not embarked on the impossible in 2015. ShareChat’s success has given immense hope to India’s startup fraternity, and motivated entrepreneurs to take audacious bets in India’s internet ecosystem,” said Madhukar Sinha, partner at India Quotient, one of the earliest backers of ShareChat.

In yet another move that is not very common among Indian startups, ShareChat announced earlier this week that it was adding $14 million to its employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), taking the total to $35 million.

Sachdeva said that for a startup of ShareChat’s scale, it is crucial that its employees feel valued, because there are enough other giants in the market looking for similar talent. “Our biggest competitors are global peers from the U.S. and Beijing,” he said.

The new capital will also help the startup further invest in its AI prowess and build new products and establish deeper partnerships with music labels, Sachdeva said. TechCrunch reported earlier this year that ShareChat had quietly launched a fantasy sports app called Jeet11.

Sachdeva said Jeet11 is gaining good traction and the startup’s foray into fantasy sports and short-video app categories demonstrates how fast it moves.

ShareChat has also been working with advertisers as it solidifies its monetization avenues, he said. “The brands are loving the fact that they can engage very strongly with users,” he said.

The startup is also thinking about expanding outside of India, though such plans are in an early stage, he said. A fraction of ShareChat’s users today already live outside of India. The app has attracted many users of Indian diaspora, he said.