ShareChat has raised greater than half a billion {dollars} to broaden its short-video app Moj, months after the Indian authorities banned its greatest rival TikTok.
Mohalla Tech, the mother or father of the social media platform, raised $502 million in a recent funding spherical led by Tiger World Administration and current investor Lightspeed Enterprise Companions. Moreover, Snap and one other current investor Twitter participated, valuing the startup at $2.1 billion, it mentioned in a blogpost on Thursday. This takes the entire fundraise by the startup to about $766 million over six rounds.
ShareChat additionally turned the ninth startup to hitch the nation’s unicorn membership. On this week alone, 4 startups — social commerce app Meesho, fintech companies Cred & Groww, and E-pharmacy startup, PharmEasy—have raised funds at a valuation of greater than $1billion.
“This capital will assist us speed up our journey of constructing India’s largest AI-powered content material ecosystem,” Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder of ShareChat, mentioned on Twitter.
Scott Shleifer, accomplice at Tiger World, in a press release, mentioned as web penetration will increase, ShareChat’s main content material creation platform is poised to broaden dramatically by bridging into on-line purchases of products and providers. “Moreover, Moj is well-positioned to grab the chance offered by the expansion of brief video in India.”
The five-year-old startup, launched by three IIT Kanpur alumni—Ankush Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Singh—presents its meme and video-sharing platforms in 15 regional Indian languages and was one of many early gamers within the regional content material area in India. Its nine-month-old Moj is among the many array of choices which have come up reminiscent of Josh, Roposo and TakaTak after India banned ByteDance-owned TikTok.
Google and Microsoft have not too long ago invested within the mother or father of Josh, whereas the web search big additionally led a $145-million funding within the mother or father of Roposo.
“We’re at a major inflection level in our firm’s journey — because the web penetration additional deepens in India,” Sachdeva mentioned within the blogpost, including that the agency is well-positioned to broaden its ecosystem of merchandise to greater than 1 billion month-to-month energetic customers. “We’ve seen how massive the short-video market is in China — with round 80% of your entire web inhabitants utilizing one of many short-video merchandise (Douyin, Kuaishou and so forth) day by day.”