Popular Indian social media platform, ShareChat has announced that it has established a new ShareChat Labs, a Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Palo Alto, California. This is ShareChat’s first adventure outside the India. The company says that the new establishment will be the epicenter for developing cutting edge technology for the platform.
Ankush Sachdeva, CEO and Co-founder of ShareChat said,”This is an exciting and proud moment for us. As we set-up ShareChat Labs to develop groundbreaking technology solutions to accelerate our ambition of building the most sophisticated content creation and distribution engine, we believe the talent ecosystem available in the Valley is going to play a major role.”
The new ShareChat Labs in Silicon Valley will focus on innovating and developing solutions powered by machine learning. These solutions will be aimed at enhancing “user experience through advanced camera capabilities, deeper visual understanding of the images/videos and stronger content recommendation”. For example, ShareChat is an Indian social media platform that caters to a wide variety of linguistic demography. This puts a problem before the platform of correctly understanding variations in dialect, the difference in the writing script, and the contextual meaning of different languages. With the help of improved machine learning developed at the new ShareChat Labs, the company looks to solve the outstanding linguistic problem.
The machine learning models developed at the CoE will also be used to better personalize the user feed, detect NSFW content, and restrict hate speech and fake news on both ShareChat and Moj. The center will further focus on building technology around AR, VR, Mixed Reality (MR), filters, stickers and editing effects to help provide creators with more complex and creative tools.
Furthermore, Gaurav Mishra, a former product leader at Uber, has been appointed as the Senior Vice-President-Product at ShareChat. Gaurav had also co-founded Guruji.com, which is a search engine in local Indian languages. His job role would be to supervise product development for Sharechat and the short video platform, Moj. He will also look after building a product team with expertise in consumer products and ML/AI.
“This gives me immense pleasure to contribute to the movement of empowering language-first internet users. I have been a great believer in the language-first approach in the internet space, and I am thankful to ShareChat management to entrust me with the responsibility to accelerate the growth of the platform,” said Gaurav Mishra.
On Gaurav’s appointment, the co-founder Ankush Sachdeva said, “Gaurav is a proven product leader with over 20 years of experience in the consumer technology space. He will be a driving force towards strengthening content feed and personalization, building advanced product capabilities and reinforce the robustness of our ad-tech platform. He will be a valued member of our leadership team as we continue to build ShareChat for the next billion internet users.”
ShareChat is a major Indian social media platform that allows users to share their opinions, record their lives and make new friends in their own native languages. The company had recently raised $40 million in its pre-series E financing round with participation from Twitter, Elevation Capitaland and Lightspeed Ventures. It currently has over 160 million users and offers its services in 15 different Indic languages. The company also runs a short video platform called, Moj, which has over 80 million monthly active users.
“We are building both ShareChat and Moj with a future-ready approach. We would focus on building new products and solutions around camera technology and AI/ML (especially focusing on deep learning). We would also look at hiring the best technology minds globally and not just limited to India. We would soon expand our talent base to other international geographies and drive excellence in technology innovations in the Indian internet space,” said Gaurav Mishra.
