Mohalla Tech valued at near $3 bn

The study by the firm showed that Moj has a better penetration in Southern states while rival Josh leads in the Hindi belt.

Mohalla Tech, the parent firm of ShareChat and short video platform Moj, has raised a fresh $145 million in funding led by Temasek and Moore Strategic Ventures at a valuation of $2.88 billion. Mirae-Naver Asia Growth Fund also participated in the financial round. The investment is an extension of the company’s series F financial round as part of which it had raised $502 million in April this year at a valuation of some $2.1 billion, joining the unicorn club.

Founded in 2015, Mohalla Tech has now raised over $911 million across seven fundraising rounds.

The bulk of the capital will be used to build a sophisticated AI (artificial intelligence) feed besides attracting and incentivising a diverse creator base. The company will also deploy a portion of the funds towards hiring skilled talent in the AI and ML (machine learning) spaces.

“With a monthly active user base of 160 million and more than 50 million strong creator community, Moj in a year has grown into India’s number one short video app. To strengthen our leadership position, we will continue to invest in our AI capabilities, scaling our global AI org, building advanced editing tools and helping our creators monetise on the platform,” Ankush Sachdeva, CEO and co-founder at Moj and ShareChat, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Moj and ShareChat, which is an Indian language social media platform, jointly command a monthly user base of about 340 million, the company claims. An average user spends about 34 minutes on Moj everyday and the platform garners over 4.5 billion views daily, the firm said. India’s ban on Chinese short video app TikTok last year has increased demand for homegrown short video platforms.

Indian short-form apps have successfully retained 67% of the TikTok era users and have onboarded around 30-35% new users led by tier two cities over the past year, analysts at consulting firm RedSeer had said in a report published in April. “This has been a result of increased supplier push and aggressive marketing by platforms,” they said. The study by the firm showed that Moj has a better penetration in Southern states while rival Josh leads in the Hindi belt.