According to two sources familiar with the situation, the parent company of Indian social media company sharechat, MOHALA tech, has raised nearly US $300million in a new financing round. The investors in this financing round include Google under alphabet, media giant Shidai group and Singapore Temasek holding company. The valuation of this social media company is nearly US $5billion.
The two sources added that the deal would be announced as early as next week.
MOHALA tech, Google and Temasek have yet to respond to requests for comment, and time group has yet to comment.
This is the second key investment made by Google in the field of short video in India. Previously, the company invested in Josh, a competitor of sharechat's sister company MOJ.
According to one of the above two sources, the field of Indian start-ups is not favored by people. Google's investment in this market shows that the company is very interested in the short video industry, and also shows that Google is willing to invest in the investment theme of start-ups. Indian technology start-ups raised a record $35billion in new capital in 2021. However, due to the new uncertainties facing the global market, investors are increasingly worried about corporate governance issues. Therefore, these companies have been struggling to raise funds.
After India banned tiktok and some other Chinese applications under byte beat in 2020, the popularity of short video applications such as MOJ and Josh soared.
Sharechat currently has 180million monthly active users. According to one of the above sources, MX takatak recently acquired by MOJ and MOHALA has a total user base of 300million.
In the last financing round, sharechat raised $266million from investors such as alkeon capital and Temasek. At that time, sharechat was valued at $3.7 billion. In addition, the company's investors also include twitter and snap, the parent company of snapchat, a "burn after reading" communication application.
The source added that if Tesla CEO Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter is approved, musk may own 6-8% of sharechat shares. (Tang Feng)