Chinmay Bidkar
25 November 2016, India :
ShareChat, a regional language social networking app has raised $4 million in a Series A round of funding led by Lightspeed India Partners. Existing investors SAIF Partners and India Quotient, as well as from Delhi-based early-stage venture capital firm Venture Highway also participated in the round.
“The fresh round of funds will be employed majorly for going deep into the vernacular ecosystem. Having multi-lingual interfaces is just not enough. We have literally just touched the surface of our target audience. These are early adopters. A lot of work is required on our part to make ShareChat a household brand, digging deep into the user base, and to bring even more interesting infotainment and utilities for our ever-expanding Indian market,” said Farid Ahsan, Co-founder and CEO of ShareChat.
“Our core focus is to become the most essential non-chat social app for a first-time internet user, whether it is through local language content or through infotainment services which are relevant to them. They are hunting for things to do that are utilitarian (payments, commerce, etc.) — there’s plenty of choice here from Flipkart to Ola to Justdial to Paytm. They are also hunting for ways to kill time (TV, games, books, magazines, news, music and social media),” said Ahsan.
ShareChat was started by IIT Kanpur alumni Ahsan, Bhanu Singh and Ankush Sachdeva. It was started as a content repository app for sharing on WhatsApp, and has now evolved into a full-fledged social network.