India-based multilingual social networking service ShareChat secured $502m in series E funding today from investors including social media operator Snap and microblogging platform Twitter.
Investment firm Tiger Global Management led the round, which included venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners and undisclosed additional backers. It valued the company at $2.1bn and increased its funding to $765m since it was founded in 2015.
ShareChat provides a social media app available in 15 local languages, with more than 160 million monthly users. Snap had partnered its parent company Mohalla Tech earlier this year to combine its camera tool with the latter’s video clip sharing platform, Moj, which was launched in June 2020.
Twitter had backed a $40m pre-series E round for ShareChat in September 2020 at a $650m valuation, investing together with India Quotient, Lightspeed Ventures, SAIF Partners, Pawan Munjal and Ajay Shridhar Shriram.
The company had previously received $100m in a 2019 round featuring Twitter, HillHouse Capital, India Quotient, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Morningside Ventures, Shunwei Capital, SAIF Partners and TrustBridge Partners.
Shunwei Capital led a $99.2m series C round for ShareChat the year before, which included contributions from consumer electronics manufacturer Xiaomi, Lightspeed, Morningside, SAIF Partners, Venture Highway and an unspecified additional investor.
Xiaomi had previously led ShareChat’s $18.2m series B round earlier the same year, participating alongside India Quotient, Lightspeed, Shunwei, SAIF and Venture Highway.
Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder and CEO of ShareChat and Moj, said in a blog post: “We are at a significant inflection point in our company’s journey – as the internet penetration further deepens in India we are well-positioned to expand our ecosystem of products to 1 billion-plus [monthly active users] cumulatively.”
