Snap Inc joins Google to invest in ShareChat

After Google, Snap Inc is in talks with Bharat-focused social media firm ShareChat for a minority stake. According to a TechCrunch report, Google and Snapchat’s parent are in advanced stages to pump in more than $200 million in ShareChat’s Series E round at a valuation of more than $1 billion. 

ShareChat’s had raised $40 million in a pre-Series E round in September. Entrackr had exclusively reported ShareChat’s bridge round in which the firm was valued at around $630 million. Till date, ShareChat has scooped up over $260 million across equity rounds. 

If the deal goes through, the Twitter-backed company will count three tech giants and two social media giants as its backers.

In November, an ET Now report suggested that Google was in talks with ShareChat for a potential acquisition. However, the talks appeared to have fallen through as Google had made back to back investments ShareChat’s competitors -- Dailyhunt and InMobi’s Glance in December. 

Both Dailyhunt and InMobi have their separate short video apps -- Josh and Roposo -- which is a direct competitor to ShareChat’s Moj.

As of September, ShareChat had exceeded over 160 million MAUs with the average daily time spent by users on the platform at 31 minutes while Moj had garnered over 80 million MAUs.

Ever since the ban on TikTok in India, home-grown short video apps, including Moj, have been growing rapidly. Moj was also one of the top three most downloaded apps between October 23 and November 22. According to data sourced from Sensor Tower, Josh was downloaded more than 12 million times followed by Moj’s 8.14 million and MX TakaTak’s 6.9 million during the one month period.