The use of social media becomes more evident as ShareChat, a social networking platform completes a $100 million (about Rs. 718 crores) equity financing round led by microblogging site Twitter with private equity firm TrustBridge Partners also getting involved.
This is the first such bet taken by ShareChat which has been fighting out China’s ByteDance in its home market, on an international company with this investment by Twitter. Twitter has been looking to go deep in tier 2 and tier 3 cities in India where it doesn’t have a great user base. ShareChat is a ready platform for Twitter to expand. The tech giant which is based in San Francisco with a market capitalisation of $31.42 billion saw its founder and CEO Jack Dorsey getting involved personally in the deal.
“We have very clear targets about what we want to do. The populace today already has tremendous exposure to all the global platforms, so, when they come to your platform, they don’t expect any less. We are going to be making sure that our technology is at par, if not better than our peers,” Ankush Sachdeva, chief executive of ShareChat.
This latest capital infusion in the four-year-old company saw ShareChat valued at $600-650 million. Both the online platforms have come together on the big purpose of serving the public conversation, help the world learn faster and solve common challenges. This deal will help ShareChat grow and give the company’s management team access to Twitter’s executives as creative partners.
TrustBridge Partners which are China-focused manages assets of about $5 billion, according to Crunchbase and have previously invested in ticketing giant Meituan Dianping and WeWork China. In the latest round the existing backers of the company Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, IndiaQuotient and Morningside Venture Capital, have also participated in the latest round. ShareChat has been scouting for top engineering talent, particularly in the area of Machine Learning in India and as well as in the Silicon Valley. The company is also contemplating opening an outpost in the tech Mecca. A lot of people who have worked in the Valley are joining the company. They are planning to go deeper and looking for talent working in global companies and get them on board.
This development also came in a time when ShareChat is in a battle with China’s ByteDance, especially with messaging platform Helo for greater user engagement and eyeballs in Asia’s third-largest economy, which is seen as ripe for domination by all of the World’s largest social media and technology platforms, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Snap, and Twitter. ShareChat has 50 million monthly active users (MAU), across 15 languages, but expects to record up to 10-150 million monthly over a 12-month period.
