Twitter leads $100m round for India's ShareChat

Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Shunwei Capital, SAIF Capital, Morningside Venture Partners, and India Quotient also contributed. It follows a $100 million round last year led by Chinese smart phone maker Xiaomi and reportedly values the company at $650 million. The capital will be used to improve the product offering in part by building out the technology team.

“We have very clear targets about what we want to do,” Ankush Sachdeva, CEO of ShareChat, told The Economic Times. “The populace today already has a tremendous exposure to all the global platforms, so when they come to your platform, they don’t expect any less. We are going to be making sure that our technology is at par, if not better than our peers.”

ShareChat claims to be the fastest growing social network in India with about 50 million users per month in 14 languages and more than 10 million downloads on Google Play. It differentiates itself through a focus on Indian vernacular languages. There is no service in English. The company plans to build out its customer base to as many as 150 million users a month within 12 months.

Interest in Indian start-ups among global corporates is supported by an emerging middle class and the growing economic presence of tech-savvy millennials, who are seen as representing a transition toward more of a spending-oriented culture. Partnering homegrown champions is also seen as a key method to resolving complex scaling challenges related to the fragmented nature of the markets across lower-tier cities and towns. This trend has also seen traction in the local financial technology space.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• South Asia
• Media
• Consumer
• Expansion
• India
• Trustbridge
• Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Shunwei Capital Partners
• TMT