ShareChat becomes the 9th startup in India to enter the Unicorn club in 2021 after raising $502M

ShareChat has joined the coveted unicorn club after the parent company Mohalla Tech raised $502 million in a funding round led by Tiger Global and Lightspeed Ventures. Other participants in the funding round included Twitter, India Quotient, and Snap Inc. This fundraise has pushed the startup’s valuation to more than $2.1 billion which is more than a three-fold jump from the $630 million valuation in September 2020.

ShareChat becomes the ninth unicorn in the country in 2021 after Infra.Market (B2B ecommerce), CRED(Fintech), Digit Insurance (insurtech), Meesho (social commerce), InnovAccer (healthtech), PharmEasy (healthtech), Groww (Fintech), Five Star Business Finance (NBFC), and Gupshup (conversational messaging). Out of these Gupshup, PharmEasy, CRED, and Groww attained the unicorn status very recently along with Mohalla Tech.

Industry experts and research firms have predicted that India will witness a significant increase in the number of unicorns this year. According to a NASSCOM report, India will have close to 50 unicorns by the end of this year. These unicorns have furthered the hopes of the Indian startup ecosystem.

Mohalla Tech also owns a short video app Moj along with the social media app ShareChat. Moj was launched last year in July and has already made a mark in the short-video app segment riding on the back of Tik-Tok app ban in the country. It has been counted among the top three Indian short video apps including Dailyhunt’s Josh, and MX Taka Tak.

Moj claims to have more than 120 million active users per month. The short-video app platform claims that 50 million downloads happened within 45 days of its launch. Mohalla Tech aims to reach 1 billion monthly active users on both platforms combined.

Mohalla Tech has raised more than $766 million over six funding rounds to date enabling ShareChat to grow substantially and make its mark by delivering a tech-led and unique social media experience.

The social media app plans to use this funding amount to expand in India and the US. ShareChat will focus on strengthening its AI-powered recommendation engine, creator community on its app and grow its user base. According to the co-founder Ankush Sachdeva, with an increase in internet penetration in the country, the startup’s leading content creation platform will get an opportunity to expand by bridging into online purchases of products and services.

About ShareChat

ShareChat was founded in 2015 by IIT alumnus Ankush Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan, and Bhanu Pratap Singh. They discovered in 2014 that in India users looked out for content in their own language and that was the whole idea of creating ShareChat.

Headquartered in Bangalore, India, the social media app enables its users to find trending content in vernacular languages. The platform is available in 15 languages and presently has 160 million monthly active users.