ShareChat raises $1.35 mn Pre-Series A funding from SAIF Partners

Aiming to further strengthen its startup tech infrastructure to cater to its user base, vernacular social network platform ShareChat has raised a seed round funding of $ 1.35 million from SAIF Partners. Existing investors, India Quotient, also participated in the round.

Farid Ahsan, CEO, ShareChat, said, “It’s encouraging for us to see how our users have been responding and creating a really diverse variety in vernacular content on ShareChat. We plan to strengthen our technology to serve the increasing traffic and expand into more languages and content types.”

ShareChat was also applauded for its approach when it was selected as one of the 6 startups invited for the second batch of Google Launchpad Accelerator program from India.

Founded by IIT Kanpur alumni, Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh and Ankush Sachdeva in 2015, ShareChat built a first-of-its-kind social networking platform for India’s vernacular language users, available in 4 Indian languages, namely Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and Telugu.

According to ShareChat, it has already crossed 1 million downloads, and at half a million monthly active users, it has been consistently growing at 10% week on week.

Mayank Khanduja, Principal, SAIF Partners, said, “We feel it’s the best team for the job as the co-founders have strong technical backgrounds and a highly data-driven approach. The platform is powerful enough to solve the content and the social networking needs of the growing Indian smartphone users.”

Indian internet users in non-metro cities find it difficult to discover content and information, owing to poor network connections and the language barrier thanks to the English-first flavour of apps. These are the gaps that ShareChat seeks to plug and with this round of funding.

ShareChat started as a content sharing tool for Whatsapp and witnessed traction of 1 million shares a week. Already 5 million connections have been made on ShareChat