Twitter Invests $100 Million In An Indian Social Network Site ShareChat

Anita - Sep 13, 2019

In a bid to create a niche space in the growing regional social networking market in India, Twitter has led the $100 million funding round for ShareChat.

In an attempt to gain a position in the Indian growing regional social network industry, Twitter has recently led a US$100M Series D for ShareChat, which is known as the leading vernacular social network site of the country with nearly 60 mln customers.

According to Twitter India’s Managing Director Manish Maheshwari, both companies were aligned on the wider function of serving the public conversation, assisting the globe in learning faster and solving common challenges. Additionally, the investment would also help ShareChat grow and offer the management team the chance to work with Twitter's executives as partners.

Established by three graduates of Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 2015, ShareChat is currently valued at over US$600 mln. The media platform is available in several languages including Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Haryanvi, Assamese, Kannada, Odia, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam, and Hindi.

As per Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO, there are various options in the Indian market. He said:

And in accordance with the CEO guidance, the company released Twitter Lite for the Indian market exclusively to attract more people who don’t have hi-speed or costly data.

Regarding monetizing Twitter and more entering the social network industry in India, the CEO has expressed his clear focus.

The latest financing round in the Indian start-up targets that course.

Five years ago, Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Pratap Singh, and Ankush Sachdeva met at an event for technological innovation and worked together on ShareChat later.

Sharechat 1 1200x600 — ShareChat is currently valued at over US$600 mln.

Initially, they built ten WhatsApp groups with 100 users every and inside of mins. Then these groups flooded with all kinds of material including movies, pictures, jokes, etc. However, the biggest shock was that most of whom used a common language.

This marked the milestone for three graduates to develop ShareChat later. At present, Sachdeva works as ShareChat’s CEO, while Ahsan and Singh become the Chief Working Officer to head Operations teams, and Chief Technological Innovation Officer respectively.