Bengaluru-based ShareChat and Moj’s parent company Mohalla Tech announced on Friday that it raised $502 million in its latest round, taking its valuation to over $2 billion. This makes it the ninth unicorn this year, and the fifth one to be valued at over a billion dollars this week. The round was led by Lightspeed Ventures and Tiger Global, along with participation from Snap Inc, Twitter and India Quotient etc. ShareChat is an Indic language social media platform and Moj is a short video app.
The new round, the company said, will be utilised for doubling down on tech initiatives, supporting user growth, and improving platform safety features. Ankush Sachdeva, CEO & Co-founder of ShareChat, said with ShareChat and Moj, the company is well-positioned “to build the largest AI-powered content ecosystem in India.”
Commenting on growth and investment plan, he added, “With this infusion of capital, we would continue to aggressively grow our user base, build a world-class org in India and US and further strengthen our creator community, AI-powered recommendation engine and platform health.”
So far, the company has raised $766 million in six rounds. ShareChat claims it has 160 million active users. It is available in 15 languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, etc. According to a post by Ankush, Moj, which launched in July 2020, scaled to 120 million monthly active users in nine months.
“We are at a significant inflection point in our company’s journey — as the internet penetration further deepens in India we are well-positioned to expand our ecosystem of products to 1 billion plus monthly active users cumulatively,” Ankush said in a post.
Scott Shleifer, Partner at Tiger Global said, “As internet penetration increases, ShareChat’s leading content creation platform is poised to expand dramatically by bridging into online purchases of goods and services. Additionally, Moj is well-positioned to seize the opportunity presented by the growth of short video in India. We are impressed with the team’s understanding of these rapidly evolving technologies and its ability to execute quickly, and we are excited to partner with them as they continue to build a great company.”
Dev Khare, Partner, Lightspeed India, said, "ShareChat’s rise to market leadership in India's social media category has been an accelerating journey involving category creation, world-class team building and product-led growth. At Lightspeed, we are excited to have backed Ankush, Bhanu and Farid in every round from the Series A in 2016 onwards."