The Indian government has banned ByteDance’s competing product TikTok in the country, dazzling Indian users with new options for short-form video entertainment after the vacuum left by the TikTok ban. Google and Microsoft have both recently invested in Josh’s parent company, and Google led a $145 million round of funding for Roposo’s parent company.
According to the Financial Times, India’s ban on TikTok has brought spring to Indian short video apps. India’s ban on Chinese apps like TikTok has also benefited Indian startups, with ShareChat, the parent company of Indian short-form video app Moj, recently receiving more than $500 million in investment.
Indian social media company ShareChat raised more than $500 million to develop its popular short-form video app Moj, just months after the Indian government blocked competing product TikTok, owned by ByteDance, in the country. The ShareChat app has 160 million monthly users, while Moj has amassed more than 120 million monthly users in the nine months since its launch.
According to ShareChat CEO Ankush Sachdeva, the Indian government’s blocking of more than 200 Chinese apps late last year in the wake of the India-China border dispute was “a big deal… ShareChat’s investors also include Shunwei Capital, which was launched by the founder of Chinese phone maker Xiaomi. According to him, he added, “ShareChat grew several times after that ban …… (and) we also took advantage of the short video app vacuum and launched Moj.”
ShareChat, which is based in Bangalore, launched Moj, a meme and short-video sharing platform that supports 15 Indian dialects but not English, making it extremely popular among smartphone users in small-town India who are not English-speaking. According to the company, users of both apps spend an average of more than 30 minutes a day using them.
India represents a huge growth opportunity for U.S. technology companies, according to the report. According to McKinsey, only 40 percent of the country’s population will be connected to the Internet in 2019, and 86 percent of them will be under the age of 40. According to Statista, India is expected to have more than 970 million Internet users by 2025.
After the vacuum left by the TikTok ban, new options for short-form video entertainment have dazzled Indian users. Google and Microsoft have both recently invested in Josh’s parent company, in addition to Google leading a $145 million round of funding for Roposo’s parent company.
In the past six months, the company has hired five AI executives in the U.S. and the U.K. and doubled its workforce, including 50 AI engineers, in the second half of 2020.
According to the report, the U.S. and Chinese tech giants have intensified their fight for the Indian market in recent years, pumping billions of dollars into the country’s startups. in June 2020, the Indian government froze Chinese investment deals out of spite after bloody clashes between Chinese and Indian soldiers on the border between the two countries, clearing the way for U.S. investors looking to expand into the fertile Indian Internet market. In the past week alone, two other startups — social commerce app Meesho and fintech firm Cred — received investments from U.S. investors, bringing their valuations to more than $2 billion each, with the former’s U.S. investors including The former’s U.S. investors include Facebook and the latter includes Tiger Global.
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