India’s ShareChat buys local rival MX’s short-video platform TakTak for $700 million

ShareChat‘s parent company has acquired local rival MX’s short-video platform TakTak in a cash-and-stock deal worth about $700 million, according to a report from Reuters, citing two sources familiar with the matter. The announcement comes just two months after the startup raised $266 million in December 2021, pushing its valuation to $3.7 billion

The acquisition will enable ShareChat to further dominate India’s shot video market as competition heats up in the sector where foreign investors have placed major bets. In a joint statement, the companies said the two platforms together will have more than 300 million monthly users and nearly 250 billion monthly video views, creating what they dubbed as “the largest short video platform for Indians.”

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. On July 2, ShareChat launched a competitor to TikTok called Moj. The app already has over 50K downloads following the TikTok ban in India. Moj is currently available in 15 languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Haryanvi, Rajasthani, and Urdu among others.

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.

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.