Early today, Twitter, a social media giant with 206 million daily active users worldwide, made an announcement. It has invested in ShareChat , an Indian social media application for local languages. The application is a popular local language content application with more than 60 million monthly active users in India alone. It has been downloaded more than 100 million times and supports 15 languages, excluding English.
Twitter is leading a round of $100 million in the main regional Indian social media platform ShareChat
ShareChat serves 60 million users each month in 15 regional languages but not in english, which the company says is a deliberate choice
In what is Twitter The first investment in an Indian startup, the investment makes sense because both applications share a broader objective of starting public conversations. Manish Maheshwari, MD, India, said in a statement shared with IANS on Friday, “Twitter and ShareChat are aligned with the broader purpose of serving public conversation, helping the world learn faster and solving common challenges. This investment will help ShareChat will grow and provide the company’s management team with access to Twitter Executives as thinking partners. “
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The start-up based in Bengaluru is founded by three graduates of IIT-Kanpur. Today, it is valued at more than $ 600 million. It offers its services in the following languages: Hindi, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Hates, Kannada, Assamese, Haryanvi, Rajasthani and Bhojpuri.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last year said: “We love the conversational nature of society and culture. We are very excited to make Twitter viable for more and more people in the country. ” He clearly sees that there are many opportunities in India. ShareChat offers its services in Hindi, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Hates Kannada, Assamese, Haryanvi, Rajasthani and Bhojpuri.
Ankush Sachdeva is the CEO, Farid Ahsan is the Director of Operations that directs the Operations teams, and Bhanu Pratap Singh works as Chief Technology Officer at ShareChat. Like many other apps in India, ShareChat also has to battle the problem of fake news. In April, the company said it removed over 54,000 accounts and nearly half a million pieces of content since February to violate its guidelines.
ShareChat said it will use the money to strengthen its technology infra
ShareChat said it will use the $ 100 million funds to strengthen its technological infrastructure and hire more people. There is a great opportunity for companies to capture the local market and attract more users to its platform as a KPMG report and Google mentions that there will be more than 536 million non-English internet users in India by 2021.
At first, 10 WhatsApp groups were created that had 100 members each. Within minutes, they were flooded with content that included images, videos, jokes, etc. This made the founders, Ankush Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Pratap Singh realize that the consumption of vernacular language content is enormous. This created the first vernacular platform in India used by millions.
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