ShareChat receives funding of USD 4 mn in Series A from Lightspeed, SAIF Partners and others

Indian language social platform ShareChat announced closing of USD 4-million Series A round of funding led by Lightspeed India Partners, and from existing investors like SAIF Partners and India Quotient.

The funding round also saw participation from Venture Highway (through VH Capital). Sharechat is building the largest social content network in India with a focus on small town users and vernacular content.

"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," said Co-founder and CEO ShareChat, Farid Ahsan.

ShareChat allows users to create, discover and share content with each other much like people do on Tumblr and Instagram. Users can follow other users who are either a content creator or a friend on the platform for regular updates, much-like most other social networks. The key differentiator for ShareChat, however, is the primary action of sharing.

"We believe that the Indian user is very typical in his/her needs and this gives a local player a closeness to user problems when compared with global social networking giants like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Snapchat," said Co-founder and CPO, Ankush Sachdeva.

ShareChat is available in six languages, namely, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati and Punjabi. Tamil and Bengali are currently in private beta and will be shortly made available for all users.

The app has been downloaded 3.5 million times, with roughly two million active users on the platform. At a daily level, one million content pieces get shared per day from ShareChat.

ShareChat was started by Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh and Ankush Sachdeva, right after graduating from IIT-K. The fact that the founders hail from small towns has helped their cause in making their first gut impressions right.

"We are excited about the product that ShareChat is building. We have always believed that a homegrown social product, built for the aam aadmi in vernacular, addresses a big opportunity in India," said founder Venture Highway, Samir Sood.

"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," added Farid.