ShareChat allows users to create their social profiles, follow other profiles, discover and share content with each other

ShareChat, an Indian language social platform, has raised US$18.2 million in Series B from Shun Wei Capital and Xiaomi Singapore.

Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Partners, India Quotient, and VH Capital also participated in the round.

The new round of investment will be used to strengthen the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence efforts of the company. With a monthly user base of 8 million-plus, ShareChat also plans to utilise the funds for rapid expansion and efficiently manage increasing cloud infrastructure costs.

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Ankush Sachdeva, Co-founder, ShareChat, commented, “Vernacular content consumption in India has witnessed a meteoric rise in the last two years growing from 42 million in 2011 to 234 million in 2016. These numbers are a great indication of the huge opportunity available for products, focused on the vernacular audience.

Therefore, to capitalise on this, we at ShareChat, aim to use innovative technology in order to optimise social media content for this new set of Indian users. In a bid to solve for day to day problems of consumers dealing with technology, our algorithms are efficiently designed to reduce language hassles and make the platform intuitive and convenient for all,” he added.

ShareChat was started by Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh and Sachdeva as a content repository app for sharing on Whatsapp, and later evolved into a social network.

As the name suggests, ShareChat allows users to create, discover and share content with each other. Users can create their social profiles and follow other profiles, who are either a creator or a friend on the platform for regular updates.

ShareChat is available in 10 Indian languages. With 21 million downloads, the startup claims that five million content pieces get shared per day from ShareChat.

ShareChat in November had closed a US$4 million in Series A round of funding led by Lightspeed.

Last year, VoxWeb, a mobile-first special-purpose social network around ‘speaking pics, raised US$1million in its third round of funding from several unnamed individual investors.

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