Bangalore-based ShareChat, a content-based social networking app, has raised $1.3 million in its seed funding round, led by SAIF Partners. The startup’s existing investor India Quotient also participated in this round.
The company will use the fund primarily to further scale up its technology and to expand its team size to 40, said Farid Ahsan, co-founder and CEO of ShareChat. He added:
With the latest fund raise we plan to strengthen our technology to serve the increasing traffic on ShareChat and expand into more languages and content types.
He also said that the company is working on features like saving data for offline viewing and low data consumption by the app. It is also looking to launch in Cambodia, Thailand and one more country by next year. It is also looking to expand its user base to 15-20 million over the next one year.
While currently offering consumers content spread across the Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Malayalam languages, the company will now offer services and content in Punjabi, Oriya and Tamil also by end-August.
The company was founded by Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh and Ankush Sachdeva. It is a social networking platform for vernacular language users, available in four Indian languages, namely Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and Telugu.
It was one of the six startup selected to attend the Google Launchpad Accelerator Program earlier this year. After formally launching its service in October last year, the company claims that currently it has more than 1.3 million downloads and over 5,00,000 monthly active users.
It started as a content sharing tool on WhatsApp. Currently, ShareChat allows users, particularly those in non-metro cities, to follow each other, create and find content in their preferred language, and share on mobile messaging platforms.
Commenting about the funding, Mayank Khanduja, principal at SAIF Partners, said:
We’re very confident about team ShareChat’s understanding of what we see as a massive market opportunity. Moreover, 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.
