India’s ShareChat lands $40M From Twitter, Lightspeed, others to build on Moj growth, now reaches 80 million monthly users

ShareChat is an Indian social media startup that offers the content consumption and sharing platform only in Indian local or vernacular languages to cater to over 1.17 billion wireless network users of India. ShareChat is available in 15 Indian languages.

Today, the Bengaluru-based Indian regional language social platform announced it has raised $40 million in a new funding round to grow Moj, its new short video app. The round, which brings ShareChat’s total funding to $264 million, was backed by Twitter Inc and Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from SAIF Partners and India Quotient.

In August 2019, the company raised $100 Mn in a Series D round led by Twitter. Existing investors Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient, and Morningside Venture Capital had also participated in the round. In addition, ShareChat said in a press statement that the funding proceeds will also be used for product development, bringing more creators on to the app and establishing partnerships with music labels to allow users to add more tracks.

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.

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.

In August 2019, Twitter led a $100 million funding in ShareChat. At the time, Twitter said, “Twitter and ShareChat are aligned on the broader purpose of serving the public conversation, helping the world learn faster and solve common challenges. This investment will help ShareChat grow and provide the company’s management team access to Twitter’s executives as thought partners,” said Manish Maheshwari, managing director of Twitter India, in a prepared statement.