ShareChat is a social media platform that uses only Indian languages. It also has Moj, a short video platform.

Sharechat, the Indian AI-powered social media and content-sharing platform, announced a raise of $502 million in a round led by Tiger Global. Twitter (NYSE: TWTR), Lightspeed, and Snap (NYSE: SNAP) also participated in the investment round which valued the start-up at $ 2.1 billion. (Economic Times)

With this funding, ShareChat has raised $ 766 million across six funding rounds.

ShareChat

ShareChat has an estimated 160 million users and offers its services in 15 regional languages. Hoping to cash in on the Indian ban on Chinese apps such as TikTok and Helo, ShareChat launched its own version of a short video format called Moj. The app has already garnered 120 million monthly active users within the space of nine months.

It will use the new money to enhance its technology initiatives and boost the growth of its user base.

“This capital will help us accelerate our journey of building India’s largest AI-powered content ecosystem,” tweeted co-founder Ankush Sachdeva.

ShareChat uses machine learning algorithms to display customized content suitable for individual users and catering to their tastes. According to FT, the company has hired five directors of artificial intelligence in both the US and the UK in the past six months. It also doubled its workforce in the latter half of 2020 and added 50 AI engineers.

Inflection point

Sachdeva wrote in a post on Thursday morning: “We are at a significant inflection point in our company’s journey — as the internet penetration further deepens in India we are well-positioned to expand our ecosystem of products to 1 billion-plus monthly active users cumulatively. We have seen how large the short-video market is in China — with around 80% of the entire Internet population using one of the short-video products(Douyin, Kuaishou, etc) daily.”

According to sources, the start-up has plans to raise even more funds from investors in the near future.

However, ShareChat did not issue a response on this.

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