Two founders of ShareChat to exit the company; will continue to be on the board

ShareChat’s two co-founders —Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan are stepping down from their active role in the social media company. This leaves Ankush Sachdeva as the only founder in an operational role at ShareChat, which was founded by the three IIT Kanpur graduates in 2015.

Sachdeva informed about this development to the team via Slack. Entrackr has reviewed a copy of the note. According to the note, Singh and Ahsan will remain on the board of the company and will keep guiding ShareChat.

“…we have onboarded several senior leaders in Engineering, Finance, HR and Content Ops who Bhanu & Farid have helped in getting ramped up and become well-equipped in steering the company going forward," Sachdeva wrote.

Confirming the development in response to queries sent by Entrackr, a company spokesperson said, “In recent years, the company has built a strong leadership team and many of the responsibilities held by Bhanu and Farid will now rest with Manohar Singh Charan and Gaurav Bhatia who will lead the management and engineering roles respectively.”

This comes soon after mass firing at the Bengaluru-based firm where it slashed 20% of its workforce because of external macro factors that impact the cost and availability of capital. The Google and Twitter-backed firm also let go of over 100 employees after it shut down its fantasy sports platform Jeet11.

Singh and Ahsan leaving their operational roles is a surprising move as the company is yet to become significant in terms of scale. While ShareChat was valued at about $5 billion in its last financing round, its operational revenue merely stood at Rs 347 crore in the fiscal year ending March 2022. The company’s losses jumped 2.3X and stood at Rs 2,988 crore in FY22. 

During FY22, ShareChat collected more than 60% of its revenue via advertisement services on the platform. Its outstanding losses increased 96% and stood at Rs 5,261 crore in FY22.

The company has raised around $1.18 billion from investors including Alkeon Capital, Temasek Holdings and Moore Strategic Ventures, and Tencent, among others.