Mumbai: Bengaluru-based Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd, which operates the vernacular language content app ShareChat, has raised $1.35 million in a seed round of funding from SAIF Partners and existing investor India Quotient.
It raised $100,000 from India quotient in 2015 and plans to raise $8-10 million by the end of the year.
The company, founded in 2015 by Farid Ahsan, Ankush Sachdeva, and Bhanu Singh, will use the funds to ramp 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.
“Features like saving data for offline viewing, low data consumption by the app are some features that we are strengthening. We are looking to launch in Cambodia, Thailand and one more country by next year,” Ahsan said over the phone.
“We’re very confident about team ShareChat’s understanding of what we see as a massive market opportunity. Moreover, we feel it’s the best team for the job as the co-founders have strong technical backgrounds and a highly data-driven approach. The platform is powerful enough to solve the content and the social networking needs of the growing Indian smartphone users,” said Mayank Khanduja, principal, SAIF Partners.
ShareChat is a social networking platform for vernacular language users, available in four Indian languages, namely Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and Telugu.
“We will be launching five-six more languages by the end of two months,” added Ahsan. It will also be launching its chat services in August this year.
The company has over five lakh users. It plans to grow its team size to 40 and user base to 15-20 million over the next one year.
[“Source-Livemint”]
