There are so many social media platform present today that one wonders whether there is room for another one? However, ShareChat just answered this question with over a $100 million funding round led by Twitter. The startup serves millions of people in India in different regional languages.
Although Twitter is controversial these days, this is still big news. Besides Twitter, other partners also participated in the funding round, like TrustBridge Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Shunwei Capital, SAIF Capital, Morningside Venture Capital, and India Quotient. This was the Series D round of ShareChat. The new round has pushed the stakes of the company to $224 million, which puts the firm value at about $650 million.
“Twitter and ShareChat have the combined purpose of making conversations easier and helping people solve common everyday problems. This new investment will help in the growth of the company and make twitter the thought partners of the company,” said Manish Maheshwari, the Twitter official in India.
Twitter, like other Silicon Valley firms, considers India as one of its main markets. In fact, like Twitter, other Silicon Valley firms are also investing in Indian startups.
According to the CEO of ShareChat, Ankush Sachdeva, the company serves around 60 million people in 15 regional languages. English isn’t included in the languages, but the company doesn’t plan to change it soon. The CEO thinks that the power of choice has attracted people to the company. The earlier version of the app supported the English language. However, this led to a decrease in engagement with the app.
At the start, everyone wanted to converse in English. Everyone wanted the company to choose English when they didn’t know it much. According to official statistics, only 10% of India’s 1.3 billion people speak English. On the other hand, half a billion people speak Hindi, the regional language.
Therefore, ShareChat decided to remove English as a supported language. Currently, an average user spends 22 minutes on the app each day. Sachdeva thinks that removing English was the right decision as it has led to the growth of the Company.
It all began in 2014, when Sachdeva and his two friends, Bhanu Singh and Farid Ahsan, got the idea of building a platform for discussion, just like the discussions on Facebook. They knew that cricket and movie stars were popular topics of conversations. Therefore, they created WhatsApp groups and posted links to Facebook to attract many users. It was at this time that they started to build chatbots to allow users to make jokes, recommend food recipes and phone numbers. However, they soon realized that most users weren’t interested in this stuff.
Therefore, in 2015, Sachdeva and his team created an app, where users can discover, share and produce content in regional languages. A year later, a miracle happened. India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, launched his telecom network that gave the bulk of data for an extended time with little to no charges. This immediately changed the attitudes of people and more people started joining ShareChat. This multiplied the users in no time.
The same momentum is present today. ShareChat now plans to give more incentives, like money and the tools for engagement. “There is still a big hunger for content in regional languages,” said Sachdeva. ShareChat has also experimented with ads on this app. However, Sachdeva states that revenue generation isn’t their primary focus right now. “We are in Series D, so we have an obligation to our investors to make more money. However, we want to focus on expanding right now,” he said.
No other app poses a bigger challenge to ShareChat than TikTok. It is an app where users can share funny short-form videos. TikTok is one of the most popular startups with 120 million users in India. It delivers content in many regional languages.
However, TikTok, with all its ambitions, is constantly in hot waters, especially in the sensitive areas of the country. Therefore, ShareChat has an advantage in this respect. Through the years, it has strongly supported the laws of the Indian government that make social media platforms more accountable.
