India’s ShareChat raises $266 million in fresh funding, pushing its valuation to $3.7 billion

It was just five months ago that ShareChat raised $145 million from Temasek and others investors. Back then, the Bengaluru-based Indian regional language social content-sharing platform was valued at around $3 billion.

Today, ShareChat announced it has raised another $266 million in fresh funding to develop its apps’ artificial-intelligence capabilities. The round was led by Alkeon and saw participation from Singapore’s Temasek Holdings and Moore Strategic Ventures, among others, the company said in a statement. The latest funding, which is part of ShareChat’s third funding round this year, now brings the company’s valuation to $3.7 billion.

Content-sharing and short-video apps have grown in popularity in India after the Indian government banned ByteDance’s TikTok and some other Chinese apps following an India-China border clash in 2020.

We covered ShareChat back in September 2020 after the 6-year-old startup raised $40 million from Twitter, Lightspeed, others to accelerate the growth of the Moj app which reached 80 million monthly users at the time.

Founded in 2015 by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh, Bhanu Singh, Farid Ahsan, Sharechat is a regional language-focussed social media platform that heavily relies on user-generated content. It has features like anonymous chat, direct messaging, original video content under the banner of ShareChat Talkies.

ShareChat launched a competitor to TikTok called Moj on July 2, 2020. In just two months, the app had over 50K downloads following the TikTok ban in India. Today, ShareChat now has 180 million active users. Moj has 160 million users and counts Meta Platforms Instagram Reels as its key rival.

Moj is currently available in 15 languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Haryanvi, Rajasthani, and Urdu among others. ShareChat said in its statement that users of its Moj app spent an average of 34 minutes every day consuming video content.

“Both our products have been leading the market … This fresh funding will further strengthen our position and help us deliver immersive social experiences,” Ankush Sachdeva, ShareChat’s CEO, said in a statement.