The current week is on a record-breaking spree. Four days, five unicorns. That is the status up to the morning of Thursday. ShareChat, a content sharing startup, is the new member of the unicorn club. Investors are pouring a lot of money into startups.
In a recent financial round conducted by ShareChat, Tiger Global, Snap Inc and some existing investors such as Twitter Inc have invested $502 million in the content-based social media platform. This detail was revealed by ShareChat. The latest funding round has helped ShareChat to reach a whopping valuation of more than $2 billion.
Funding Details of ShareChat
The Indian Startup ecosystem is going through a golden period. Investors are showing immense trust in the growing startups. It has resulted in five startups joining the unicorn club within four days.
In a recent development, ShareChat released a statement that it has raised $502 million from the existing and new investors. The funding round was led by American venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners and American investment firm Tiger Global.
Tiger Global and Snap have joined the ShareChat investors list for the first time in the current funding round. They are the owner of Snapchat, a worldwide famous photo messaging app.
Future of Social Media Platforms and ShareChat plans
Investors are showing a special interest in Indian Social Media Platforms. It is due to a wide gap created by the banned Chinese apps. Chinese apps like Tiktok had a huge fan base in India. Due to its ban, plenty of short video platforms have risen in the Indian startup system. Moj and Chingari are some of those short video platforms that got exponential growth recently.
ShareChat said that the recent funding round has surged its market valuation to $2.1 billion. ShareChat also revealed that current funding will be used to advance the technology and the company will also utilize the funds to attract more users.
ShareChat CEO Ankush Sachdeva said:
“With this infusion of capital, we would continue to aggressively grow our user base.”
Currently, ShareChat has a huge user base of 160 million subscribers in India, whereas Moj has attracted 120 million users till now. ShareChat is the parent company of Moj. Smartphones growth and better Internet connectivity have helped these apps to reach every corner of India.
As per an insider person report, ShareChat is planning to raise more funds in the coming months. The source did not reveal its name. When contacted, ShareChat did not show any interest in talking about the funding plans for the coming months. ShareChat has raised a total of $766 million in more than six funding rounds.
ShareChat was badly affected by the covid pandemic. Last year, it fired more than 100 employees. A few months back, there was a discussion that Twitter is acquiring ShareChat. Now, the company has recovered well from the difficult period.
