ShareChat raises $18mn from Xiaomi, others
BENGALURU: Indian social media platform ShareChat, run by Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd, has raised $18.2 million in a Series B funding round led by Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Singapore and Shun Wei Capital, the company said in a statement. Existing investors including SAIF Partners, Lightspeed Partners, India Quotient, and Venture Highway also participated in the round.
The company will use fresh funds for expanding technical capabilities, especially for servers, and for hiring new people across segments like machine learning and artificial intelligence, Farid Ahsan, co-founder of ShareChat, said in an interview. It had previously raised $4 million in its Series A round in November 2016.
ShareChat is an Indic language social media platform, which was launched in 2015 with support for languages like Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi and Malayalam and others. It allows users to share posts and updates in text, video, GIFs and audio formats. It currently has over 8 million monthly active users (MAUs).
Ahsan said that after the launch of Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd in 2016, multimedia consumption had gone up significantly. “Video consumption used to be at 10% pre-Jio, now videos contribute to around 35% of the platform’s consumption,” he said citing an example.
In an earlier interaction with Mint, Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder of ShareChat said video consumption quadrupled on ShareChat after the launch of Jio in September 2016. Video consumption was 5 million minutes per day in August 2017; this touched 18 million minutes per day by December 2017.
“Vernacular content consumption in India has witnessed a meteoric rise in the last 2 years growing from 42 million in 2011 to 234 million in 2016. These numbers are a great indication of the huge opportunity available for products, focused on the vernacular audience,” Sachdeva said in a statement.