If you thought there was no space for a chat app, think again. Introducing Sharechat, an Indian chat app that exclusively serves Indian regional language natives and it serves 60 million users each month in 15 regional languages.
The latest news about Sharechat is that Twitter has invested in the company. Twitter has led an investment round of $100 million in Sharechat along with TrustBridge Partners, Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient, and Morningside Venture Capital.
Sharechat does not support English and has no plans to change this. I daresay that this is one of its strong advantages. And the fact that it grew on the back of the launch of telecom network Reliance Jio, which offered users access to the bulk of data at little to no charge for a long time.
Sharechat says it will use the funds to strengthen its technology infrastructure and hire more people.
According to Twitter’s managing director for India, Manish Maheshwari, “Twitter and ShareChat are aligned on the broader purpose of serving the public conversation, helping the world learn faster and solve common challenges. This investment will help ShareChat grow and provide the company’s management team access to Twitter’s executives as thought partners.”
This is Twitter’s first investment in an Indian startup.
This is the second investment in India’s Internet industry in the last week. A couple of days ago, Naspers led a $125 million fundraise for Meesho, an online social commerce marketplace.
