Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd, which runs multilingual social media platform, ShareChat and short video platform, Moj, has raised $78 million as part of its Series H funding round at a valuation of about $4.9 billion from Google’s parent Alphabet and Temasek Holdings.
According to regulatory filings obtained by VCCircle, Google led the round with Rs 405 crore, and Temasek invested Rs 202 crore. Post-transaction, Google will hold a little over 1% stake in the company while Temasek will hold about 2.64% stake, the filings show.
Mohalla Tech has allotted 1,501 Series H compulsorily convertible preference shares (CCPS) at an issue price of Rs 40.4 lakh per share for a total consideration of Rs 607 crore, the filings show.
With this round, Mohalla Tech has raised over $2 billion in equity funding to date. The company was also in talks with Tencent Holdings to join the ongoing funding round of ShareChat, VCCircle had reported earlier in June.
A ShareChat spokesperson declined to comment on VCCircle queries.
On 30 May, Reuters reported that ShareChat had raised $300 million from Google, Temasek and Times Internet at a valuation of approximately $5 billion.
ShareChat, Moj, and TakaTak claim to have a combined active user base of nearly 500 million users, making Mohalla Tech the largest homegrown social media organization in India.
In February, Mohalla Tech acquired TakaTak in a deal valued at $700 million, VCCircle had reported. The acquisition marked the consolidation in India’s short-video market.
Platforms like Moj, MX Taka Tak, InMobi’s Roposo, and more have all gained from the government’s ban on Chinese short-video format platform app TikTok two years ago. Since then, platforms like Roposo have also pivoted to the live video format.
ShareChat was founded in 2015 by Farid Ahsan, Ankush Sachdeva and Bhanu Pratap Singh. The firm has been focused on growing Moj as a platform after the ban on ByteDance-backed TikTok in India in June 2020.
In the short video space, Mohalla Tech competes with VerSe Innovation, the parent company of short video app Josh, Dailyhunt and Glance.
India has over 350 million online video users, and the user base growing nearly twice as fast as markets such as China and Indonesia are leading to an increase in subscribers, according to an October 2021 report by Bain and Co. The report said Moj, MX TakaTak, Josh, Roposo and Zili have more than 100 million downloads each.
