Building for Bharat

ShareChat, India’s homegrown social media platform does not run on follow or friend graphs but instead on personalized user content interests. They try to infer this by using ML technology and bringing the preferred content to the audience that comes on the platform. The creators upload and post close to 150 million content pieces every month on both ShareChat and Moj.

Talking about how they are solving some of the most complex tech challenges, Ankush Sachdeva, CEO, and Co-founder, ShareChat and Moj says, “Our vision algorithms first predict the topic of the content and start exploring the content with an initial set of a few hundred relevant users. As we get the indications from the viewers through a like, share, or full-watch, it feeds back into our algorithm, and we start to build an even better understanding of the content and find the next set of users who would be relevant for the content.” They help close to 100 million Indian content creators across all its platforms to discover and engage with relevant audiences among 400 million monthly active users. With this, they deliver close to 300 billion content views per month on both ShareChat and Moj.

Talking about keeping the platform relevant in a constantly changing marketplace, Sachdeva states, “It all starts with investing in the right people and keeping the bar very high. We have built a world-class AI org distributed globally across India, the UK, the US, and other parts of Europe. These are some of the finest AI researchers and engineers.”

Their biggest differentiator is building the best machine-understandable representation of Indian users and content. As it gained scale, its ML algorithms became more powerful in recommending the right content to the right audience. For every new user that joins, they gather a better understanding of how to personalize content for them by leveraging the data of existing users. Content on their platforms is available in 15 different regional languages. Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam, Kanada, Odia, etc, have some of the largest audience bases, giving them far more depth in understanding the content needs of Indian users. This has become a strong entry barrier.

ShareChat began its monetization journey in 2020 and since launched several unique revenue models. With its focus solely on profitability, along with user and creator experiences, it expects to hit half a billion dollars in ARR by 2025. Sachdeva signs off by saying, “In all large geographies, among various tech-focused businesses, media-led businesses have always become the first to scale profitably on the internet. For any new internet user, the first few apps they experience are always messaging and media. Therefore, for the large digital audience of India that has joined the internet over the last few years – we believe it’s possible to build a profitable social media business monetized through advertisements on the platform along with micro-payments through virtual gifting.”

Tech StackYear of inception: 2015
No. of employees: 2300+
External funding received so far: US$1.7B