After two co-founders quit, Sharechat tells staff in townhall that no plans to hire CTO, COO

Representative image.

Sharechat management has told employees in a townhall that it does not have immediate plans to hire a chief technology officer and chief operating officer to replace co-founders Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan, respectively, who have stepped down from their roles, according to sources.

This was communicated to employees in a company townhall on January 25, hours after an internal note announced that the co-founders are stepping down. A source also said that efforts were to downplay the exits, with jokes being cracked about the duo taking time off to spend it with their partners.

Last week, the Google and Twitter-backed social media company fired close to 600 employees in a bid to prune expenses.

While Ahsan was the chief operating officer, Singh had been the chief technology officer till now. The CEO said in the note accessed by Moneycontrol that senior Sharechat executives Manohar Singh Charan and Gaurav Bhatia will lead the management and engineering functions, respectively, from now on.

"Over last few months, we have onboarded several senior leaders in Engineering, Finance, HR and Content Ops who Bhanu & Farid have helped in getting ramped up and become well-equipped in steering the company going forward," Sachdeva wrote.

Mohalla Tech, the parent company of ShareChat, is currently valued at around $4.9 billion. In June 2022, it closed its Series H funding round, raising around $520 million from Google's parent company Alphabet and Singapore-based Temasek Holdings.

In December 2021, ShareChat raised $226 million as part of the same funding round, and was valued at around $3.7 billion at that time.

ShareChat, founded in 2015 by three IIT Kanpur alumni- Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan, and Bhanu Singh- was an early player in regional language content. It launched Moj in June 2020, following the TikTok ban, and has seen significant growth in the segment, alongside DailyHunt's Josh. ShareChat and Moj have a combined user base of approximately 340 million.