India-based multilingual social network operator ShareChat has raised $40m in a pre-series E round from investors including microblogging service Twitter, TechCrunch has reported.
India Quotient, Lightspeed Ventures, Saif Partners and private investors Pawan Munjal and Ajay Shridhar Shriram filled out the round.
TechCrunch said ShareChat will likely raise a further $100m in the coming months from “several major VC funds”. The company’s overall funding stands at roughly $264m since it was founded in 2015.
Owned by holding company Mohalla Tech, ShareChat provides a mobile social networking platform that caters to 15 official languages of India including Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi and Tamil. The app has more than 160 million monthly active users.
The fresh funding will go toward supporting content creators on its recently launched short video sharing platform dubbed Moj, ramping up its artificial intelligence technology and forming partnerships, particularly with the music and sports industries.
Twitter participated in ShareChat’s $100m funding round in August 2019, investing alongside HillHouse Capital, India Quotient, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Morningside Ventures, Shunwei Capital, Saif Capital and TrustBridge Partners.
Shunwei led the company’s $99.2m series C round in September 2018 that featured consumer electronics producer Xiaomi, Morningside, Lightspeed, Saif Partners, Venture Highway and an unnamed fund, following a Xiaomi-led $18.2m series B round eight months earlier that also included Shunwei, Saif Partners, India Quotient, Lightspeed and Venture Highway.
