Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by ShareChat.
The evolution of social networking platforms only dates a decade back when smartphones and the internet revolutionized the way people communicated. ShareChat, a social networking platform is available in 14 different languages, namely, Hindi, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Odia, Kannada, Assamese, Haryanvi, Rajasthani, and Bhojpuri. ShareChat provides its users with health tips, homemade remedies, weight loss, religious quotes, and a dictionary to only name a few.
Read about ShareChat founders, funding, revenue model, competitors and business model here with StartupTalky:
| Company Name | Sharechat |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | Bangalore |
| Sector | Social Media |
| Founders | Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh, Ankush Sachdeva |
| CEO | Ankush Sachdeva |
| Founded | 2015 |
| Total Valuation | $2.88 billion (August 2021) |
| Website | we.sharechat.com |
ShareChat - About & How It Works?
ShareChat - Founders & Team
ShareChat - How It All Started?
ShareChat - Competitors
ShareChat - Startup Challenges
ShareChat - Business & Revenue Model
ShareChat - Acquisition
ShareChat - Funding & Investors
ShareChat - Growth
ShareChat - Future Plans
ShareChat - FAQ's
ShareChat - About & How It Works?
ShareChat, much like any other networking platform, allows its users to create, discover and share content amongst one another. Similarly, the users can follow other users who can be content creators, friends or any personality of interest to the user on ShareChat for regular updates. Apparently, the ShareChat users are not only excited about consuming the content but also love to create it.
In the year 2018, it launched quite a few exciting features under ShareChat Talkies like anonymous chat options, direct messaging to name a few. Other exciting and newly launched features include:
- “Shake-N-Chat” which randomly connects two or more users engaging with content from creatively similar genres over a personal chat
- “Private Messaging” is designed to encourage the users to opt for one to one communication in the versatile Indian languages
- “Open tagging” is the feature that allows the users to create tags and post relevant content under these specific user-generated tags.
ShareChat - Founders & Team
ShareChat was founded by Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh, and Ankush Sachdeva.
With the vision of providing great communication and then a networking platform in mind the ShareChat founders started their journey. In October 2015, ShareChat was founded by three IITians from IIT Kanpur Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh, and Ankush Sachdeva. Initially, ShareChat started as a content sharing tool for the famous messaging application WhatsApp for the users who need to share more than 100K content pieces in a day. But as per recent times, this platform has now successfully evolved into a regional language-driven social networking platform.
ShareChat - How It All Started?
ShareChat is based on a very generic insight. All of this all started when the co-founders observed that there exists a segment of users, who would love to express themselves but do not have a platform and given an opportunity they wouldn’t be reluctant to express. So ideally this regional audience has their own preferences when it comes to content consumption which most assuredly cannot be served by social products used by the metro audience. According to the co-founders, this regional set of the audience was widely unaddressed and the market was relatively untouched until ShareChat came in the picture. And that’s how ShareChat was born by the three brilliant minds who capitalized on a general insight to make it a million-dollar startup.
ShareChat - Competitors
Smartphones today are full of social networking and content sharing applications because that’s what people want to see and do today. In this highly competitive field, ShareChat, directly and indirectly, competes with Roposo, BetterButter, Giphy, Nerdery, Digg and many more. With Instagram launching IGTV and Snapchat’s endless innovations, there’s immense competition for ShareChat to face. It has also been facing cut-throat competition from China’s ByteDance as it is actively eating up ShareChat’s market share. And over the past two years, vernacular social media space in the country vastly heated up after ByteDance-owned Helo entering the market space.
ShareChat - Startup Challenges
According to one of the co-founders, Ankush, “One of the biggest challenges we have is teaching the audience what a feed is, why you follow someone, why you create content. That is one thing which is missing in all the social networks and that’s why our audience, which is this new audience that has come up in India, finds it extremely difficult to use Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat”.
ShareChat - Business & Revenue Model
There are two prominent kinds of business models followed by the content marketing community on the internet. The first one builds a network where the content material is created and owned by the platform creators. On the other hand, lies the second kind of model in which a major part of the content material is created by the customers. This is what ShareChat does.
ShareChat believes like the popular social networking platforms, where the users can upload photos, videos, create content, chat with others, make friends, and more. However, unlike the other social media platforms, Sharechat helps in conveying all the messages in the regional languages of India.
ShareChat does not charge its users to earn revenue. Instead, it generates revenue through advertisements, payment transactions, and sponsored campaigns.
ShareChat's revenue figures had not much impressive in the last financial year (FY20), where the company had spent Rs 715 crores and managed to register Rs 9.4 crores in revenue. The loss during FY20 is Rs 676 crores, out of which ShareChat lost Rs 329.4 crores in marketing and business development. The company is eagerly awaiting the results of the upcoming fiscal year.
ShareChat - Acquisition
ShareChat acquired Bengaluru-based content production company, HPF Films on September 16, 2020, which was the last company that ShareChat acquired.
The company says it will contribute to building a “language-first, community-driven user-generated hyperlocal content ecosystem".
| Date | Company | About Company | Value | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| March 2, 2019 |
Clip App | An online video sharing app | Undisclosed | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| February 21, 2020 | Elanic | Bengaluru-based buying and selling app | Undisclosed | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| April 24, 2020 | Circle Internet | News platform for native language Indian internet users from tier 2 and tier 3 cities | Undisclosed | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| April 27, 2020 | Memer | Meme producing platform for the Indian users | Undisclosed | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| September 16, 2020 | HPF Films | Content producing platform that helps in the production of digital advertisements, short films, web series and more | Undisclosed |
| Date | Stage | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| July 27, 2021 | Series F | $145 million | Temasek, Moore Strategic Ventures and Mirae-Naver Asia Growth Fund. |
| April 8, 2021 | Series E | $502 million | Tiger Global Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners |
| December 23, 2020 | Debt Financing | $60 million | Twitter Ventures |
| September 24, 2020 | Series E | $40 million | - |
| August 15, 2019 | Series D | $100 million | |
| September 19, 2018 | Series C | $99.2 million | Shunwei Capital |
| January 18, 2018 | Series B | $18.2 million | Shunwei Capital and Xiaomi |
| November 23, 2016 | Series A | $4 million | Lightspeed India Partners |
| July 13, 2016 | Seed Round | $1.4 million | SAIF Partners |
| May 11, 2016 | Non Equity Assitance | $50K | Google Launchpad Accelerator |
| March 5, 2015 | Seed round | - | India Quotient |
ShareChat - Growth
Here's taking a look at the growth highlights of ShareChat:
- ShareChat has been downloaded over 21 million times
- ShareChat has 160 million users and a creators' community of 50+ million
- On an average, around 5 million content pieces get shared every day
- ShareChat has half a million active users monthly
- ShareChat has an average Play Store rating of 4.5
- Has grown 7x in 2018-19
- ShareChat's Moj is leading with around 75 million monthly average users leaving behind MX Takatak and Josh.
ShareChat - Future Plans
In the coming future, ShareChat claims that there will be major changes in the way the application functions. The users can fairly expect a lot more variety in the area of the content formats. Also, the users can expect a lot more content creators transforming into celebrities, and to see people who become famous on ShareChat. Also, India has 22 official languages and more than 1600 known dialects. So ShareChat wants to cater to the more and more regional audience and they certainly don’t want to limit themselves to India. ShareChat currently has more than 130 million monthly active users (MAUs) and has been trying to take advantage of TikTok’s absence from India amid the government’s ban.
ShareChat - FAQ's
What is ShareChat?
ShareChat, much like any other networking platform, allows its users to create, discover and share content amongst one another. However, the platform is distinguished by the regional languages that ShareChat uses for the content shared.
What services does ShareChat provide?
ShareChat provides its users with health tips, homemade remedies, weight loss, religious quotes and a dictionary to only name a few.
Who is the founder of ShareChat?
ShareChat was founded by Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh, and Ankush Sachdeva.
Who is the CEO of ShareChat?
Ankush Sachdeva is the CEO of ShareChat and has been so since 2017.
Who are the competitors of ShareChat?
ShareChat, directly and indirectly, competes with Roposo, BetterButter, Giphy, Nerdery, Digg and many more.
Author: Vidhi Punamiya
Source : https://startuptalky.com/sharechat-social-media-app/
Date : 2021-08-13T15:13:00.000Z