Google Launchpad startup ShareChat bags funding for social networking in 4 languages

Telugu, one of the classical languages of India, is spoken by around 74 million people. Photo credit: Youtube.

India is the fastest growing smartphone market in the world, and many of the new users coming to the internet are from small towns and rural areas where English is not the lingua franca. They struggle to use apps and browse the web because of the language barrier. Social networking is hard to do in an alien language.

This is a hard problem to solve because India is multi-lingual. The last available census data lists 30 Indian languages which cross the mark of one million native speakers.

Bangalore-based ShareChat is taking a crack at bridging this gap with its social networking app in multiple vernacular languages. Currently, it is available in four Indian languages – Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, and Telugu.

Today it announced seed funding of US$1.35 million from Saif Partners, with participation from existing investor India Quotient. The funding will allow ShareChat to ramp up its tech infrastructure and support more languages. It claims to have crossed a million downloads and half a million monthly active users, growing 10 percent week on week.

WhatsApp origins

“ShareChat has started growing virally now and every new user strengthens the platform even further,” says Farid Ahsan, CEO of ShareChat. “It’s encouraging for us to see how our users have been creating a really diverse variety in vernacular content on ShareChat.”

Farid co-founded ShareChat with Bhanu Singh and Ankush Sachdeva last year. All three are IIT Kanpur alumni.

They began with a content sharing tool for WhatsApp – hence the name ShareChat. When they started to see over a million shares a week, the engineers decided to build out that tool into a full-fledged vernacular social network platform.

The first major validation they got was ShareChat being selected for the second batch of the Google Launchpad accelerator in Mountain View, California, along with five other Indian startups. This has now been reinforced with the funding from Saif Partners, a leading VC firm focusing on investments in India and China with over US$4 billion under management.

See: Meet the 6 Indian startups in Google’s second Launchpad