ShareChat is a social network in India. The social network has served tens of millions of people. The social network operates in India regional languages for four years. ShareChat gains $100 million financing round led by global giant Twitter.
Besides Twitter, Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient also join the round. This new round pushes the firm’s value into $650 million.
Twitter shares a similar purpose to ShareChat. Both platforms serve the public conversation, help the world learn faster, and solve common challenges.
Also read: Koku’s Expansion to Indonesia
The investment helps ShareChat grow and provide the company’s management team access to Twitter’s executives and partners. Twitter sees this investment to conquer India’s market. Similar to other silicon Valey firms, Twitter counts India as one of its key markets.
ShareChat
Each month ShareChat serves 60 million users. Moreover, the platform uses 5 regional languages. Besides, it currently does not support English. Yet, with this investment, they plan to also use English.
The main reason why the platform does not use English is that only 10% of India’s 1.3 billion people speak English. On the other hand, Hindi, its regional language, is spoken by half a billion people. Therefore, the platform pulled its support for English.
Today, an average user spends 22 minutes on the app each day.
ShareChat founded in 2014 by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Singh, and Farid Ahsan. Their inspiration to build the platform comes from a discussion on a Facebook group.
During that time, India people use WhatsApp groups to discuss the country’s interesting topics. Then, the three founders of SghareChat built a chatbot. Within the chatbots, users can discover different genres of jokes, recommendations for phones and food recipes, among other things. Yet, people did not show interest in those recommendations.
Also read: India’s Car Market at Its Worst
Later in 2015, Sachdeva and the company moved on from chatbots and created an app where users can share content in the languages they understand. A year later, the app became one of the most used platforms in India.