Mohalla Tech, the parent firm behind Indian social media platforms Moj and ShareChat, has raised $145 million as an extension of its Series F round, at a valuation of $2.88 billion. Founded in 2015, Mohalla Tech has now raised over $911 million across seven fundraising rounds.
Singapore state investor Temasek has led the recent investment round, Moore Strategic Ventures (MSV) and Mirae-Naver Asia Growth Fund, jointly set up by Mirae Asset and South Korean web portal Naver Corp.
This is an additional investment beyond the $502 million raised in April this year from Tiger Global, Lightspeed, Snap and Twitter, and the company had been valued at $2.1 billion at the time.
The investment will amplify the platform’s health and safety
The bulk of the capital will build a sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) feed besides attracting and incentivizing a diverse creator base. The company will also deploy a portion of the funds towards hiring skilled talent in the AI and machine learning (ML) spaces. The firm has hired senior executives in the AI and ML spaces in recent months in the UK and the US.
“We are immensely proud of what we have been able to achieve with Moj and ShareChat in the last 12 months. We are very fortunate to attract a bunch of very high-quality names in our series F round. The list just got longer with Temasek, MSV and Mirae-Naver joining hands with us,” said Ankush Sachdeva, CEO and Co-founder, Moj and ShareChat.
Moj and ShareChat, jointly command a monthly user base of about 340 million
Moj has become India’s number one short video app with the highest monthly active users, with an average user time of 34 minutes every day, scoring over 4.5 billion views daily. The monthly active user community has grown to 160 million for Moj and 180 million for ShareChat due to its availability in Indian languages. Moj also got a growth boost in India after its contemporary Chinese TikTok was banned over national security issues.
In addition, ShareChat, the Indic language social media platform, is positioned uniquely with an average user time of 31 minutes daily.
“We are excited to partner with Moj as they build India’s premier short-form video platform and have been impressed by this management team’s speed and agility in capturing the opportunity,” said James McIntyre, Senior Managing Director and COO at MSV.
