SAIF Partners said it has invested $ 1.35 million (about Rs 9 crore) in ShareChat, a vernacular social network.
The Bengaluru-based firm was also selected for the second batch of the Google’s Launchpad accelerator in Mountain View, California, along with five other Indian startups.
The capital infusion is a part of ShareChat’s seed round of funding which also involved participation from existing investors, India Quotient, a statement said.
ShareChat will leverage the funds raised towards ramping up its tech infrastructure to cater to its constantly growing user base and to reach out to more people across India with a variety of content formats, it added.
ShareChat has built a first-of-its-kind social networking platform for India’s vernacular language users, available in four Indian languages — Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and Telugu.
It has already crossed 1 million downloads and at half a million monthly active users, growing at 10 per cent week on week.
ShareChat was started by three IIT Kanpur alumni, Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh and Ankush Sachdeva in 2015. It began with a content sharing tool for WhatsApp and upon seeing over a million shares a week, the firm decided to build out that tool into a full-fledged vernacular social network platform.
“With the latest fund raise, we plan to strengthen our technology to serve the increasing traffic on ShareChat and expand into more languages and content types,” Ahsan, who is the CEO, said.
Source: The Economic Times
