Reddit to open an office in Bengaluru, hire local teams amid India push

Communities around Bollywood, Cricket, finance, and technology are driving adoption among Reddit users in India.

Reddit is opening an office in Bengaluru as part of the social media company’s efforts to enter the Indian market, people familiar with the matter told Moneycontrol.

The company has hired employees in recent months across various functions, including growth, community management, operations and strategy, policy, and finance, and continues to actively hire, sources told Moneycontrol. Some of these positions may be remote.

This follows Reddit registering two entities - Reddit Technologies India Private Limited and Reddit Community Network India Private Limited, both in Mumbai in July 2024.

Sources said that Reddit is building out a team that can help deliver culturally relevant local experiences in the country, similar to a few other markets. Reddit declined to comment on this matter.

This move comes as India, the world's second largest Internet market, emerges as a key focus market for the social media firm's future growth strategy, both in user growth and revenue. Reddit has previously stated its intention to expand its user base in India by tapping into the country's large internet population.

The company's larger advertising competitor, Meta, counts India as the largest user market with over a billion users across its family of products that include Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Snapchat parent Snap Inc also considers India as one of its biggest markets outside the United States, with over 200 million monthly active users as of May 2023.

While Reddit hasn’t disclosed any user numbers for the India market as yet, Moneycontrol has learnt that its unique daily active user base grew by 90 percent year on year for the July-September quarter of 2024. This includes a 20 percent increase in women users coming onto the platform during this period.

Reddit had over 25 million monthly active users in India as of 2023, according to market research firm Statista.

India's rapid user growth has been a key driver for Reddit's rising daily active users from international markets in recent quarters. In Q4 2024, Reddit's unique daily active user base from international markets grew by 46 percent to 53.7 million users, nearly half of the platform's overall base of 101.7 million users.

Communities around Bollywood, Cricket, finance, and technology are driving adoption among users in India. City communities, that allow users to discuss locally-relevant topics, have also experienced growth across cities such as Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, and Gurugram, Moneycontrol has learnt.

AI-powered language translation to expand reach

Last year, Reddit had stated that it plans to grow its user base in markets such as India by offering culturally relevant and location-specific content.

The firm has been working on real-time machine translation of its content to expand its international reach and, in recent months, has rolled out machine translated content in eight languages including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German.

In October, Reddit had stated that the move to offer machine translated content had resulted in a fourfold increase in users in Q3 2024 compared to the previous quarter (Q2 2024). Following on this success, the company had said it plans to expand machine translation to over 30 countries through 2025.

These efforts come as Reddit looks to scale up its revenue from international markets in the forthcoming quarters. International markets accounted for about 18.7 percent of the platform's revenues in Q4 2024, while the remaining 81.3 percent came from the United States.

"Machine translation...is enabling international users to participate in their favorite communities and find the information they seek. International growth is critical to our goal of Reddit being a global platform" Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman stated in a letter to shareholders in January 2025.

Founded in 2005 by Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, Reddit is a social news and discussion website with a large network of communities where people come and discuss their interests, hobbies and passions as well as various other topics, also referred to as subreddits. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2024.