5Y News | Indian Social Media Platform ShareChat Raises $502 Million at $2.1 Billion Valuation
India's latest unicorn.
Indian social media platform ShareChat recently announced it has raised $502 million in a new funding round led by Tiger Global Management, Lightspeed, Snap, Twitter, and other investors. Following this round, ShareChat's valuation has risen above $2.1 billion. The proceeds will be used to accelerate technology innovation and support user growth.
5Y Capital participated in the company's Series C and D rounds in 2018 and 2019.
Founded in 2015 by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Singh, and Farid Ahsan, ShareChat aims to offer Indian users a new way to socialize and interact.
Ankush Sachdeva, CEO and Co-founder of ShareChat
ShareChat allows users to post content in 15 Indian languages. On the platform, users can share their moods, document their lives, publish text and video, and make new friends. The ShareChat interface is extremely easy to use, allowing new users to get started immediately — a feature that has helped the app quickly penetrate India's lower-tier markets.
After years of development, ShareChat has continually expanded its content diversity. It is now India's largest regional social media platform, with 160 million monthly active users (MAU).
ShareChat user growth trend
In 2020, ShareChat launched Moj, a short-video app. Moj allows users to download and upload 15-second videos, and can leverage ShareChat's social features to build a video-sharing community for its users.
Moj filled the market gap left by TikTok's departure from India. According to ShareChat CEO and co-founder Ankush Sachdeva, Moj reached 120 million MAU within nine months of launch.
AI-powered recommendations are a key strength for both ShareChat and Moj, enabling users to efficiently discover precisely targeted content across the entire content library.
In Ankush Sachdeva's view, relying solely on social connections to recommend content is insufficient — AI algorithms should play a central role in content feed ranking and personalization. With AI algorithms, they aim to deliver more precise content recommendations even when users haven't followed many other accounts, while also expanding the distribution reach of user-generated content.
Looking ahead, Ankush Sachdeva said that from a company development perspective, both ShareChat and Moj are at important inflection points. "We've seen the scale of China's short-video market, where 80% of internet users use short-video products daily. Internet penetration in India is going deeper and deeper, which is a huge tailwind for us. In the future, the combined MAU of our product portfolio will exceed 1 billion."
5Y Capital (formerly Morningside Venture Capital) currently manages approximately $3 billion across USD and RMB dual-currency funds. We believe the world would be a better place if the "crazy" you that others see starts to be believed.
BEIJING · SHANGHAI · SHENZHEN · HONG KONG
