Farid Ahsan is the co-founder of ShareChat, the first social sharing app in India that allows users to share video, audio, images, and GIF.
Early life and education
Farid Ahsan was born in 1993 in India. In 2008, Ahsan studied at Cathedral Sr. Sec. School in Lucknow, India. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in engineering from Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India in 2014.
Early career
In April 2012, Farid Ahsan first worked at Robotics Club in IIT-Kanpur as a coordinator. Ahsan was responsible for managing every aspect of robotics on the campus until April 2013. In May 2013, Ahsan worked as a Corporate Finance Analyst at Deutsche Bank in Mumbai Area, India. Ahsan left the bank in a few months.
ShareChat
While attending at Indian Institute of Technology, Ahsan began developing apps together with other fellow students Bhanu Pratap Singh and Ankush Sachdeva in 2012; and headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka. After three years and 17 products, the trio later savoured success with ShareChat, a social networking app.
ShareChat lets users create, discover, and share content from digital platforms to its interface and vice versa, in their preferred Indian language. The languages that ShareChat is available to users are Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Haryanvi, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Tamil, and Telugu.
It all began in 2014 when, using mobile numbers that users gave on a Facebook group for Bollywood news, Sachdeva created ten WhatsApp groups with a hundred members each—the maximum limit for a group then. The members openly shared posters and movie trailers and debated in the vernacular. This experience gave the founders ground testing for a dedicated vernacular language platform. These WhatsApp groups were closely related to chatbots, where users would sign up to get a specific type of content that is to their preference.
In October 2015, after a year of evaluating market demands for a vernacular language social medium in India, the founders launched ShareChat in public as a content sharing platform. In April 2016, ShareChat enabled user-generated content creation on its platform, providing its users to share their posters and creative content. In 2017, ShareChat grew 1.7 million Google Play shares, 5 million downloads, and a user base growing at about 30 percent monthly.
As of Q4 2018, ShareChat has more than 40 million users monthly. In January 2019, ShareChat launched three new features, providing a great user experience through its intuitive user interface, and serving to more than 35 million users across 14 Indian languages.
In March 2019, ShareChat is in initial talks with Tencent Holdings Ltd and other investors to raise as much as $200 million, according to two people familiar with the matter. ShareChat has struggled to grow over the past few months after Chinese media giant ByteDance launched ShareChat clone Helo and short video app TikTok in India last year.
As of March 2019, ShareChat’s significant people include Ankush Sachdeva as Chief Executive Officer, Farid Ahsan as Chief Operating Officer, Bhanu Pratap Singh as Chief Technical Officer, and Sunil Kamath as Chief Business Officer. Forbes featured the co-founders in 30 Under 30 Asia in 2018, for their work with the vernacular social media platform.
In 2019, ShareChat has been recognized as one of the most relevant and significant social media platforms during the Indian general elections. ShareChat has also been noted by the Election Commission of India to fight the concern of fake news alongside Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
As of now, ShareChat is accessible only in India and is not available for Indians living outside the country.
Funding Rounds
In March 2015, ShareChat raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round funding from its lead investor India Quotient. In May 2016, ShareChat raised $50,000 in non-equity assistance round, led by Google Launchpad Accelerator. In July 2016, ShareChat closed $1.35 million in a seed round funding, led by SAIF Partners with existing investor India Quotient. In November 2016, ShareChat raised $4 million in a Series A round, led by Lightspeed India Partners, and from existing investors, India Quotient and SAIF Partners. The Venture Highway (through VH Capital) also participated in this funding.
In January 2018, ShareChat closed in a Series B round of $18.2 million, led by Xiaomi and Shunwei Capital. Xiaomi has directly invested $5.76 million and $2.81 million has come from Shunwei Capital, floated by Xiaomi’s founder Lei Jun. The rest of the investment in this round has been put in by four existing investors: $4.29 million from SAIF Partners, $2.94 million from Lightspeed Partners, $2.06 million from India Quotient, and $264,000 from Venture Highway.
In September 2018, ShareChat raised $99.23 million in a Series C round, led by existing investor Shunwei Capital. Existing investors Xiaomi invested $16.83 million, $15.2 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Venture Highway, SAIF Partners, India Quotient, Morningside Venture Capital, and Jesmond Holdings accounted for the remaining capital. In this round, the company’s valuation grew seven times, to stand at $460 million.
ShareChat has raised a total of $122.8 million in funding. ShareChat is funded by 11 investors.
Acquisitions
In March 2019, ShareChat acquired Clip app for an undisclosed amount.