Google mulling investments in ShareChat buy

Tech giant Google is reportedly planning to buy out Bengaluru-based social media platform ShareChat for $1.03 Bn. In August 2020, the news was doing rounds that Microsoft may invest in the $100 Mn a funding round; reports suggested that ShareChat was valued at $650 Mn.

ShareChat recorded a 166% spike in its monthly active user’s base from 60 Mn during the pandemic to 160 Mn till now Over these months, the daily average user time spent on the platform has also increased from 24 minutes to 31 minutes, the company’s cofounder and CTO Bhanu Pratap Singh said.

ShareChat’s last funding round was in August 2019, when it raised $100 Mn in a Series D round led by Twitter, with existing investors Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient and Morningside Venture Capital also investing further.

Till date, the company has raised $222.8 Mn in eight funding rounds, according to data available on Crunchbase. ShareChat was part of Inc42’s UpNext series on soonicorn startups in 2019, and was expected to reach a $1 Bn valuation by 2021.

ShareChat in 2015 began its journey as a content-sharing tool for WhatsApp with users sharing about 100K content pieces per day. The company gradually evolved into a regional language-focused social media platform. It relies on user-generated content, and enables them to create, create, discover and share content with each other much like people do on Tumblr and Instagram.

In order to leverage the growth further, the company launched a short video app of its own called Moj. The Moj app has garnered over 80 Mn MAUs with users spending on an average of about 34 minutes on the platform. It has more than 50 Mn downloads on Google Play store.

Moj too, like ShareChat, is available in vernacular languages, such as Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Haryanvi, Rajasthani, and Urdu among others.

The social media platform’s growth in Tier II and Tier III areas is one of the main reasons why Google is probably planning to buy ShareChat.