ShareChat closes $40 Mn pre-Series E spherical

Vernacular social media platform ShareChat has closed its $40 million pre-Series E spherical led by current investors Lightspeed India and SAIF Partners. Pawan Munjal, CEO and Chairman of Hero MotoCorp and Ajay Shridhar Shriram, Chairman, DCM Shriram are the 2 new investors who pumped in undisclosed sums via their family offices.

The fresh proceeds could assist ShareChat to ram up its quick video app Moj’s positioning in the overcrowded market. The corporation released Moj within a week of TikTok’s ban and currently it crossed 50 million downloads.

A substantial chunk of the proceeds could be deployed toward product development, developing the creator ecosystem and setting up partnerships with tune labels for Moj, stated the corporation in a press release. Entrackr had solely stated about ShareChat raising $forty million in July.

Previously, the Bengaluru-primarily based company had raised a $100 million Series D spherical led by Twitter in August 2019. The investment assertion has come at the heels of ShareChat accelerated its ESOP pool through adding $14 million worth shares.

According to the corporation, ShareChat and Moj collectively have over 240 million MAUs presently. While ShareChat itself has surpassed over a hundred and sixty million MAUs withinside the past month with the common daily time spent through users at the platform at 31 mins, Moj has garnered over eighty million MAUs with customers spending on an average about 34 mins at the platform.

In the past couple of months, ShareChat was reportedly in talks with Sequoia, Google in addition to with Microsoft to elevate a bigger spherical of up to $200 million. However, there’s no fresh update on these talks.

So far, ShareChat has raised around $264 million throughout six institutional rounds. The fresh proceeds could assist the corporation to bolster Moj’s mojo in the short video area.

The brief video app area has sturdy and deep-pocketed organizations such as Times Internet, InMobi and DailyHunt. The corporation requires to elevate more capital and it’d be interesting to peer who all are geared up to fund ShareChat’s ambition.