Twitter-backed start-up ShareChat continues with inorganic expansion

Acquires Saif Partners-backed Circle Internet to strengthen hyperlocal content on platform

Continuing with its inorganic expansion strategy, social media start-up ShareChat has acquired Saif Partners-backed Circle Internet for an undisclosed amount, in order to help the homegrown app strengthen hyperlocal content on its platform. The company had earlier acquired memes platform Memer for an undisclosed amount in April.

With this acquisition, the existing 15-member Circle team has joined ShareChat and will be contributing towards building a language-first, community-driven user generated hyperlocal content ecosystem, said the Twitter-backed company. 

“This acquisition will help us penetrate deeper into geographies and nurture a thriving hyperlocal content ecosystem that will understand and serve the latent content needs of, the next billion internet users more effectively,” said Manohar Charan, VP, Corporate Development and Strategic Finance, ShareChat. “Circle’s hyperlocal expansion playbook complements ShareChat’s wide user base to create a strategic advantage and enhance our operational muscles to boost a community-powered content ecosystem.” 

 

IIT alumnus Shashank Shekhar, who was heading content operations at ShareChat before co-founding Circle in 2018 with Uchit Kumar and Gaurav Agrawal, will now be heading the overall content strategy for ShareChat.

“Circle evolved as an invisible thread to bridge the gaps in content being made available to non-English-speaking internet users, through relevant and contextual hyperlocal content. As we intend to scale up across India and replicate the model in other forms of content genre through a robust user-generated content strategy, we could not think of anyone better than ShareChat to partner in the journey,” said Shekhar.

The company is actively looking to partner with more startups in areas such as AI, ML, computer vision, online gaming, live streaming and other such technologies. "We are concentrating on levers to increase content depth, increase user engagement and create deeper monetisation avenues and we will look at both organic and inorganic ways to achieve these goals. We will continue to look at synergies that will help us to build capabilities for better user engagement, drive hyperlocal engagement, faster go to market, and serve content the right way," said Charan.

According to reports, it is in talks with technology giant Google to raise up to $200 million as it gears up to fill the void created by the TikTok ban in India. The company has already launched a short video app Moj, tailor-made for the Indian audience.