India’s vernacular social networking platform, Sharechat, operated by Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd is in the final stages of raising $15-18 million in Series B round led by Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi and its founder Lei Jun’s venture capital fund Shunwei Capital.
The term sheet was signed a few weeks ago and the investment should formally close soon, according to TOI, citing a person aware of the matter. The startup is likely to be valued at $65-70 million post the fund raise. These funds will help Sharechat to add more languages on their platform and improve their product by recruiting more developers and data scientists.
Earlier in November 2016, ShareChat raised $4 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed India Partners. The round also saw participation from existing investors SAIF Partners and India Quotient, as well as from Delhi-based early-stage venture capital firm Venture Highway.
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Founded in 2015 by IIT-K alumni Farid Ahsan, Ankush Sachdeva, and Bhanu Singh, allows users to create, discover and share content such as videos, jokes, audio songs and images. The Android app, which shows around 2 lac+ downloads on the Google Play Store, is available in multiple Indian languages—Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, and Bengali.
Shunwei Capital, which invests in mobile Internet, IoT, and tech companies, was keen on investing in Indian startups, in partnership with domestic VC firms. The Chinese VC firm had closed its third fund in July 2015 with a capital commitment of $1 billion.
In April this year, Shunwei Capital, along with Accel Partners invested around $5 million as part of a Series A round in a gaming startup Mech Mocha.
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