India's ShareChat gets $40m pre-Series E round

SAIF Partners, Twitter, Lightspeed Venture Partners and India Quotient all re-upped while Pawan Munjal, CEO and chairman of Hero MotoCorp, and the family office of Ajay Shridhar Shriram, chairman of DCM Shriram, came in as new investors.

Twitter and TrustBridge Partners led a $100 million round last year that also featured Lightspeed, SAIF, India Quotient, Shunwei Capital, and Morningside Ventures. TrustBridge, Shunwei and Morningside are China-based investors. In 2018, Chinese smart phone brand Xiaomi led a $100 million round at a reported valuation of $650 million.

The new capital will support the growth of Moj, a short video platform, through investment in product development, ecosystem expansion, and establishing partnerships with music labels, ShareChat said in a statement. Moj is one of many short video apps to launch after India banned TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance. TikTok had about 200 million users in India.

Founded in 2015, the company’s primary social networking app has achieved more than 100 million downloads on Google Play and boasts over 160 million monthly active users (MAUs). Each user spends an average of 31 minutes per day on the platform. Moj was launched as recently as July, but it has already crossed the 80 million user threshold. Average daily usage is 34 minutes.

ShareChat differentiates itself from other platforms by operating in 14 languages, from Hindi and Bengali to Assamese and Haryanvi. There is no service in English. 

Notably, the company has not specified whether its existing Chinese investors have re-upped. Increasing amounts of strategic and financial capital from the country has entered India’s technology ecosystem in recent years – often seen as a mark of validation for start-ups – but souring relations between Beijing and New Delhi have complicated matters.

In April, a regulatory update was released requiring government approval of deals involving investors from countries bordering India. The action was taken in response to local criticism of an innocuous public market deal by China’s central bank.

The government maintained that Chinese investors can continue to participate in the growth of India’s technology sector – provided they abide by the new rules. Since then, Chinese investment activity has tailed off.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Technology
• Expansion
• India
• TMT
• Lightspeed Venture Partners
• SAIF Partners