As Twitter battles out a rather stagnated user-base in the world’s most data consuming market — India, the company is now looking at alternative routes. One of those alternative routes that the social networking giant seems to have taken, is leading a $100 Million round in ShareChat — a regional social networking platform in the country.
This is Twitter’s first such big investment, and the company is teaming up with private equity firm TrustBridge Partners for the round. Valuations and the amount of equity Twitter now possesses, are unknown for now.
Twitter has had decent financial outing this year, at a time when most other “unicorns” from the US tech side are having a not-so-good run at the Wall Street. That, coupled with the fact that it needs deeper penetration into India’s Tier II/III market is what could have inspired this move. According to media reports, CEO Jack Dorsey has himself been involved in this round.
Sharechat is a popular regional social network, that aims at “providing a comfortable digital space not only for the people who want to use the Internet in their mother tongue but also for first-time internet users, to share their thoughts, emotions, opinions and become friends with others without any language barrier”. The network has gained decent traction and has emerged rather successful in an otherwise clutterred domain.
According to co-founder Ankush Sachdeva, ShareChat currently records month active users (MAU) of about 50 million, across 15 languages. And with this fresh burst of capital and expertise from Twitter, the company expects to ramp that number up to 120-150 million monthly over a 12-month period.
“Twitter and ShareChat are aligned on the broader purpose of serving the public conversation, helping the world learn faster and solve common challenges. This investment will help ShareChat grow and provide the company’s management team access to Twitter’s executives as thought partners,” said Manish Maheshwari, the newly appointed managing director of Twitter India.
With this fresh $100 Million in bank, Sharechat’s combined capital raise now stands at roughly $224 Million.
