Lightspeed leads $4m round for India's ShareChat

Existing investors SAIF Partners, India Quotient and Venture Highway also participated. ShareChat, which targets speakers of Indian vernacular languages, will use the new capital to improve its technology base and to add more minority languages to the platform. Currently the app supports six languages, with two more in private beta.

ShareChat was launched last year as a content-sharing tool for WhatsApp, whose business head Neeraj Arora is an advisor at Venture Highway. The founders decided to build it into a separate app and social network after seeing its popularity among WhatsApp users.

The platform has 2 million active users now, but the founders hope to grow the active user base to 25 million by 2018. They believe the app will be particularly attractive to users in smaller cities and rural areas, both because of the support for their local languages and because the app is designed to use low amounts of power and cellular data.

Offering users content in their local languages rather than English is not a new idea in India. In 2014 Sequoia Capital led a INR1 billion ($16.4 million) round of funding for Verse Innovation, which offers news content and ebooks in over a dozen Indian languages.

Lightspeed is currently investing out of its first India-focused fund, which closed last year at $135 million. The vehicle follows the same strategy as the firm's global fund, targeting pre-Series A and Series A investments in technology start-ups across a range of sectors.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Technology
• Media
• Early-stage
• India
• Lightspeed Venture Partners
• SAIF Partners
• TMT