From being a sharing tool to becoming a social platform

ShareChat, which was just a content sharing tool until recently, has just raised $1.35 million in a seed investment round headed by SAIF Partners. Other investors included their present investor, India Quotient.

The ABCs of ShareChat

Three IIT-Kanpur graduates came together in October, 2015 to start ShareChat. These young men were Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh and Ankush Sachdeva. ShareChat is a content sharing app where people can share news, jokes, GIFs and audio. Interestingly, unlike other apps, it is a multi-lingual app with language options in Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and Telugu. In its initial phase, the app claimed users sharing about 1 lac stories every day. This new development comes close in heels with the app becoming one of the most important players in the social networking market.

The App’s USP

The USP of ShareChat is the multi-language content option that it offers. As per the reports, only 100-120 million Indian people are comfortable with English. The rest of the population still prefers their mother tongue to converse in. According to the founders, ShareChat taps into this uncharted market territory the size of which is huge. The report also states that the size of mobile using Indian population will grow to 850 million by 2018, which will only ensure the growth in vernacular market.

Moving Forward

The startup plans to use the funds for their further expansion. They are eyeing at growing their team size and also grow their user base to about 20 million in one more year. The app claims to have registered 1.3 million downloads and over five lac monthly users since its inception. Of this number, 950,000 installs are coming via Google Play store and the remaining 350,000 are coming from APK shares. Apart from this, the developers are also working towards introducing Punjabi, Oriya and Tamil to the language options.Have you used ShareChat yet? Tell us about it in the comments section below.

Takeaways:

• ShareChat, which was just a content sharing tool until recently, has just raised $1.35 million in a seed investment round headed by SAIF Partners.
• It is a multi-lingual app with language options in Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and Telugu.
• They are eyeing at growing their team size and also grow their user base to about 20 million in one more year.

The app claims to have registered 1.3 million downloads and over five lac monthly users since its inception.