India's ShareChat raises additional $145m
Temasek Holdings, Moore Strategic Ventures, and Mirae Asset Global Investments have led a $145 million Series F round for Indian social media platform ShareChat at a valuation of $3 billion.
It comes three months after a $502 million Series E led by Tiger Global Management that valued the company at $2.1 billion. That round included participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, India Quotient, and US messaging giants Twitter and Snap, formerly known as Snapchat.
ShareChat was valued at less than $700 million as recently as last year, when it raised a $40 million pre-Series E featuring Lightspeed, India Quotient, Twitter, and SAIF Partners. It has raised more than $900 million since its inception in 2015, according to AVCJ Research, with previous investors also including Venture Highway, Shunwei Capital, Morningside Venture Capital, Trustbridge Partners, and Xiaomi.
ShareChat offers services in 15 of India’s vernacular languages and claims to be the largest regional social media service in the country. There is no service in English.
Core offerings include texting, video sharing, and friendly networking, with a strong emphasis on ease-of-use and local culture. One of the more popular use-cases is the sharing of shayaris, a class of traditional Indic-language poetry now trending online as source material for valentines and inspirational quotes.
The investment signals growing investor interest in Indian media outlets as internet and mobile penetration in the country’s less urbanized areas catches up with the largest cities. Last month, Pratilipi, a literature, comics, and storytelling platform also backed by Shunwei, raised a $48 million Series D. This followed NewQuest Capital Partners' acquisition of animation studio Cosmos-Maya from KKR-backed Emerald Media.
Much of the momentum has been attributed to political tensions with China last year that resulted in the Indian government banning dozens of Chinese media apps. This included short-video leader Tiktok, which has some 200 million users in the country. This led to a spate of investment in local short-video apps and the development of ShareChat’s video service Moj.
ShareChat claims that its number of monthly active users had more than doubled every year since 2016 to 120 million as of April. CEO Ankush Sachdevea said he expects Moj to help the company achieve a network of one billion monthly active users, although he has not specified a timeframe.
The company will use its Series F capital to build out its artificial intelligence-enabled content creation and recommendation system.
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