ShareChat closes $40 Mn pre-Series E round

Vernacular social media platform ShareChat has closed its $40 million pre-Series E round led by existing investors Lightspeed India and SAIF Partners. Pawan Munjal, CEO and Chairman of Hero MotoCorp and Ajay Shridhar Shriram, Chairman, DCM Shriram are the two new investors who pumped in undisclosed sums through their family offices.

The fresh proceeds would help ShareChat to ram up its short video app Moj’s positioning in the overcrowded market. The company launched Moj within a week of TikTok’s ban and recently it crossed 50 million downloads. 

A significant chunk of the proceeds will be deployed towards product development, growing the creator ecosystem and establishing partnerships with music labels for Moj, said the company in a press release. Entrackr had exclusively reported about ShareChat raising $40 million in July.

Previously, the Bengaluru-based firm had raised a $100 million Series D round led by Twitter in August 2019. The funding announcement has come on the heels of ShareChat expanded its ESOP pool by adding $14 million worth shares.

According to the company, ShareChat and Moj together have over 240 million MAUs presently. While ShareChat itself has exceeded over 160 million MAUs in the past month with the average daily time spent by users on the platform at 31 minutes, Moj has garnered over 80 million MAUs with users spending on an average about 34 minutes on the platform.

In the past couple of months, ShareChat was reportedly in talks with Sequoia, Google as well as with Microsoft to raise a larger round of up to $200 million. However, there is no fresh update on these talks.

So far, ShareChat has raised around $264 million across six institutional rounds. The fresh proceeds would help the company to strengthen Moj’s mojo in the short video space. The short video app space has strong and deep-pocketed companies including Times Internet, InMobi and DailyHunt. The company requires to raise more capital and it would be exciting to see who all are ready to fund ShareChat’s ambition.