ShareChat raises $18.2 million in Series B funding round led by Xiaomi

Xiaomi has directly invested $5.76 mn in and $2.81 mn has come from Shunwei Capital, VC fund floated by Xiaomi’s founder Lei Jun.
ShareChat raises $18.2 million in Series B funding round led by Xiaomi
ShareChat raises $18.2 million in Series B funding round led by Xiaomi
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Home-grown vernacular social networking platform ShareChat has raised Series B round of funding from a clutch of investors led by Chinese mobile major Xiaomi. The total amount raised in this round is $18.2 million (Rs 116.31 crore).

Of this total, Xiaomi has directly invested $5.76 million (Rs36.84 crore) and $2.81 million (Rs 18.01 crore) has come from venture fund Shunwei Capital, floated by Xiaomi’s founder Lei Jun.  

The rest of the investment in ShareChat in this round have been put in by SAIF Partners ($4.29 million), Lightspeed Partners ($2.94 million), India Quotient ($2.06 million) and Venture Highway ($264,600). All four are existing investors in the startup.

The most interesting part is that the ShareChat’s mother firm, Mohalla Tech’s valuation is being placed at a healthy Rs 436 crore, a substantial jump from the kind of figures floated earlier. None of the parties involved have officially confirmed any of this information to the media or the public at large.

The fact that Xiaomi and its sister venture Shunwei Capital were eyeing investments in the 3 years old startup ShareChat was already in the air for a while and even then, a section of the media had carried this report that the startup’s valuation was being pegged between Rs 400 to Rs 500 crore.

Over the last three years of its existence ShareChat has regularly received funding from its existing investors as mentioned above, led by SAIF Partners and was part of the accelerator programme run by Google following which it received a seed funding grant of $50, 000 from the search engine giant.

ShareChat’s operational model is to allow its subscribers to share content, such as videos, jokes, songs and images with the other members on the platform. The unique feature of this Indian startup is that it can be downloaded from the Google (Android) Play Store and used in many Indian languages, which include Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada and Odia.

The company is still attracting very little income, compared to its costs in terms of the manpower and administrative costs, the revenue figures are showing an upward trend of late and probably the startup will see better days ahead.

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