Bengaluru-based vernacular social networking app Sharechat, owned by Mohalla Tech has raised Rs 120 crores (around $18m) in a Series B round of funding from Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi and its founder Lei Jun’s venture capital fund Shunwei Capital along with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Saif Partners, India Quotient and VH Capital, as reported by YourStory and Mint. Earlier in November 2016, Sharechat has raised Rs 27.5 crores ($4m) in a Series A round from the existing investors.

The Link Legal team represented Sharechat, and its existing investors Lightspeed Ventures, SAIF Partners and India Quotient in the fundraise, led by partner Manish Gupta, senior associate Shivam Tandon, and associate Suraj Prasad Meher, according to a press release from the firm.

IndusLaw acted as the legal advisors for Xiaomi Singapore and Shunwei Capital in the transaction and was represented by their Bengaluru-based team, comprising of partner Srinivas Katta, partner Winnie Shekhar, senior associate Gayatri Menon, associate Sanjana Ramkumar and associate Pavani Nath.

Earlier this week we reported that IndusLaw had also advised Xiaomi and Shunwei, with the Singapore office of Eversheds Harry Elias on an $8m investment in microlending start-up KrazyBee.

Founded in 2015 by three young IIT Kanpur alumni Farid Ahsan, Ankush Sachdeva, and Bhanu Singh, ShareChat allows users to create, discover and share content such as videos, jokes, songs and images and is available in multiple Indian languages – Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada and Odia. With a monthly user base of more than 8 million, it was also reported that the regional networking app plans to use the fresh funds to expand its technical capabilities, strengthen the machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts of the company and efficiently manage increasing cloud infrastructure costs.

2018-01-18