Your Tech Story

sharechat

sharechat

ShareChat Raises a $100 Mn in a Twitter Led Funding Round

After a long struggle, India has also become home to many creative and useful startups, and even the global tech companies agree with that. Following that very fact, Twitter, one of the biggest technology company, just closed the D series funding as the lead for a four years old Indian company ShareChat.

Where Twitter led the funding, major investment brands including TrustBridge Partners, Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient and Morningside Venture Capital took part in the investments, among which a few are the company’s existing investors. With the latest round of funding, the company was able to raise a $100 million, and with that, the company now values at about $650 million. Till now, the company has raised around $224 million.

ShareChat is an Indian social network that allows people to chat in the regional languages. This is the reason why despite tens of popular chat apps, ShareChat has grown to tens of million users in just four years. Twitter also sees the potential in the startup that is why it took the privilege to lead the funding for the company.

sharechat
Image Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

There has been no statement from Sharechat on the matter. But the managing director of Twitter India, Manish Maheshwari said in a statement, “Twitter and ShareChat are aligned on the broader purpose of serving the public conversation, helping the world learn faster and solve common challenges. This investment will help ShareChat grow and provide the company’s management team access to Twitter’s executives as thought partners.”

Twitter just appointed Manish Maheshwari in April 2019 for its India office after it started facing a decline in its growth in India. After his appointment in Twitter, Maheshwari has said in a statement, “With premium Indian content on the rise in multiple regions across the country, I believe we are scratching the surface of what’s possible with Twitter in India.”

ShareChat supports almost every regional language except English, which has been the unique feature to attract its 60 million users to the platform. And, the company has no plans to change that in the coming future. So investing in ShareChat can be a step forward for the company to expand its limits to different regions, regional languages and people from different background.

Twitter Will Get a Minority Stake in ShareChat After Investing $50 Million in the Company

The India-based social networking app ShareChat is becoming more popular and is about to raise over $100 million from different investors, including from the microblogging website Twitter. According to the sources, Twitter is leading a financing round for ShareChat and will be investing $50 million from itself in the company.

It will be the first international investment round for ShareChat, after which the company may value at $600-650 million. Along with Twitter, ShareChat’s existing investors will also be participating in the investment round. Those existing backers include Xiaomi, Shunwei Capital, Morningside Ventures, etc. Another Hongkong based firm named Hillhouse Capital will also be joining the investors for the round. According to sources, Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey will be directly involved in the process.

The investment round will help ShareChat grow as a leading social network against its rival company, and the parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, which has got a firm hold on most of the Indian audience through its various subsidiaries, including TikTok and Helo. AMong which Helo is the biggest rival of ShareChat.

Before Twitter, ShareChat was in talks with the Chinese tech giant Tencent for the investment, which proved to be a failure, that too, twice in the period of one year. After Twitter will be leading the investments for ShareChat, it will get a minority stake in the latter’s shares. In fact, we can expect to see an integration of ShareChat into Twitter soon.

“Twitter never makes a minority investment of this kind, it is usually an acquisition. This is very significant for ShareChat looking at how the Chinese players especially ByteDance have been able to wean away users onto their platform,” said an investor tracking the segment.

The round of investment and partnership with Twitter can bring a lot of opportunities for ShareChat. In fact, the usual number of monthly users for ShareChat may rise above 30-35 million. Also, the company may monetise its platform to earn some profits and to improve the app after receiving the investments.