Sharechat bags $49 million in debt round led by Lightspeed, Tencent

In December 2023, the company fired 200 employees, around 15 percent of its workforce, in the second such move this year, to cut costs and achieve profitability within the next four to six quarters.

The move came after the company laid off around 600 employees in a similar cost-cutting move earlier this year, as co-founders Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan stepped down.

The duo recently raised $3 million in seed funding from venture capital firms India Quotient, Elevation Capital and a few high-profile angel investors for their robotics startup General Autonomy.

Backed by investors such as X (formerly Twitter), Google, Lightspeed and Temasek, ShareChat’s revenue increased by 59 percent to Rs 553 crore in FY23 from the previous year, the company's annual financial report, sourced from Tofler, shows.

But the social media firm’s net losses shot up 72 percent to Rs 5,144 crore in FY23 on rising server rents, financing costs, foreign exchange losses, etc.

According to a company source, the headline loss number for FY23 is inflated because of multiple notional cost entries and one-time expenses such as amortisation of goodwill from acquisitions (amounting to Rs 1,903 crore), forex losses on account of restatement of USD-denominated debentures and accrual of interest on debentures.