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ShareChat becomes 9th unicorn in 2021 after $502 Mn round led by Tiger Global

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Social media platform ShareChat has also joined the list of unicorns with a $502 million Series E round led by Tiger Global with participation from Snap and existing investors including Twitter and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

According to the company, it has reached a post-money valuation of $2.1 billion. This is more than three-fold jump in the company’s valuation from $630 million during its pre-Series E round in September 2020. The fresh capital will be deployed to grow the company’s user base.

ShareChat has now become the ninth unicorn in 2021 after Groww, PharmEasy, CRED, Meesho, Digit Insurance, Innovaccer, Infra.Market and Five Star Business Finance (NBFC).

“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+ MAUs cumulatively,” said Ankush Sachdeva, CEO and co-founder of ShareChat in a blog post.

Currently, ShareChat claims to have over 160 million users in India whereas its short video app Moj has 120 million users.

Soon after the ban on Chinese-linked apps by the Indian government in June, ShareChat launched its short video platform app Moj. The app surpassed 50 million downloads within 45 days of launch and is currently counted among the top three home-grown short video apps which also include MX TakaTak and Dailyhunt’s Josh. 

According to Sensor Tower data, MX TakaTak has 181 million app downloads to date followed by Moj and Josh with 178 million and 148 million downloads respectively.

While ShareChat did not disclose the break-up of Series E  fundraise. Fintrackr had decoded the company’s shareholding structure during its pre-Series E round. SAIF Partners was the highest stakeholder in the company until September 2020 with 14.81% stake followed by Lightspeed with 14.33%. 

During the last round, Shunwei Ventures and Twitter controlled 9.83% and 9.47% respectively whereas ShareChat’s co-founder Mohd Farid Ahsan had 7.36%. Ankush Sachdeva and Bhanu Pratap Singh had an equal stake of 7.35% in the company.

According to Fintrackr, ShareChat had posted operating revenue of Rs 9.4 crore in FY20. For ShareChat, the fiscal year was the first in which the six-year-old company started collecting operating revenues. Around 95.1% of this revenue was earned through the sale of advertisement space.

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