Social media platform ShareChat’s parent company Mohalla Tech has raised $78 million as part of its Series H funding round at a valuation of about $4.9 billion from Google’s parent Alphabet and Singapore-based Temasek Holdings.
As a part of the transaction, Mohalla Tech, which also runs a short video platform called Moj, has allotted 1,501 Series H CCPS (compulsorily convertible preference shares) at an issue price of Rs 40,44,944 apiece for a total consideration of Rs 607 crore in cash, the company's filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) show.
The regulatory filings further showed that Mohalla Tech may raise more funds as a part of its Series H funding round. Google, alone led this round with Rs 405 crore, and Temasek invested Rs 202 crore. A recent Reuters report had said that Mohalla Tech may raise $300 million in a funding round from Google, Temasek and Times Internet.
Post the round, Google will hold a little over 1 percent stake in Mohalla Tech, while Temasek will hold about 2.64 percent stake, the regulatory filings showed.
News website Inc42 first reported the development saying that the fundraise seems to be a part of a larger round of $250-300 million. ShareChat declined to comment.
With the current funding round, Mohalla Tech has raised over $2 billion in equity funding to date. In February this year, the company had also raised $100 million from China's Tencent Group in debt.
The company's fundraise comes nearly four months after Mohalla Tech had acquired Times Internet’s short video platform MX TakaTak in a $600 million cash and stock deal and had merged it with Moj, to tackle the rising competition in the short video space from Meta’s Instagram reels and Google’s YouTube Shorts, in the world’s fastest-growing internet market.
Mohalla Tech is betting on the short-video industry, which is gaining traction with Instagram’s Reels leading the pack. According to a RedSeer report, while Facebook's short videos and Instagram's Reels continue to dominate in the top 50 cities, its Indian counterparts like DailyHunt’s Josh, Moj, and MX TakaTak have a significant user base in the tier-2 and tier-3 cities.
In December last year, ShareChat had raised $226 million at a valuation of $3.7 billion, with a focus on building its products to be the leader in the Indian short video and social media space Moneycontrol had reported.
Founded in 2015 by three IIT Kanpur alumni- Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Singh, ShareChat was one of the early players in regional language content. It launched Moj in June 2020, after the TikTok ban, and has seen significant growth in the segment, along with DailyHunt’s Josh. ShareChat and Moj have a user base of 340 million.
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