India’s social media story has never been a single language. With over 22 official languages and hundreds of regional dialects, the country’s 800+ million internet users represent a linguistic diversity that most Silicon Valley platforms weren’t built to serve. Mohalla Tech Private Limited saw that gap—and built something entirely different.
Founded in 2015 by Ankush Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan, and Bhanu Pratap Singh, Mohalla Tech is the Bengaluru-based company behind ShareChat and Moj, two of India’s most-used social platforms. Its story is one of sharp product thinking, bold bets, and a deep conviction that the next wave of internet users would arrive speaking languages other than English.
This post breaks down how Mohalla Tech got here, what powers its products, and where it’s headed next.
The Rise of ShareChat: Built for Vernacular India
ShareChat launched in 2015 with a clear mission: build a social media platform that worked for users who communicated in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, and dozens of other regional languages. At a time when Facebook and Twitter were still English-first, this was a deliberate pivot toward an underserved audience.
The platform allows users to create, share, and engage with content across 15 Indian languages. From memes and music to news and devotional content, ShareChat became a hub for what’s often called “Bharat”—India’s non-metro, non-English-speaking population. These are users who were getting online for the first time, often via affordable smartphones and low-cost data plans, and they wanted content that reflected their lives and cultures.
The timing was critical. Between 2016 and 2018, Reliance Jio’s entry into the telecom market slashed data prices dramatically, bringing hundreds of millions of new users online. ShareChat was ready. The platform’s vernacular-first approach gave it a first-mover advantage in a space global tech giants were slow to address.
By 2021, ShareChat had grown to over 160 million monthly active users, with engagement metrics that rivaled far better-funded competitors.
Moj and the Short-Video Revolution
When the Indian government banned TikTok in June 2020 amid border tensions with China, it created an immediate vacuum in the short-video market. TikTok had amassed over 200 million Indian users—and overnight, they had nowhere to go.
Mohalla Tech moved fast. Within days of the ban, it launched Moj, a short-video platform designed to fill that gap. The timing was precise, but the execution was what mattered. Moj was built to serve the same vernacular audience as ShareChat, offering video creation tools, regional audio tracks, and a recommendation engine tailored to local preferences.
The response was remarkable. Moj reached 80 million monthly active users within months of launch. Creators who had built followings on TikTok migrated quickly, drawn by Moj’s regional language support and familiar short-form format. The platform eventually became one of the most downloaded apps in India and regularly appeared alongside competitors like Instagram Reels and Josh in market-share discussions.
What distinguished Moj wasn’t just its timing—it was how well it understood its users. Content on Moj spans dance, comedy, cooking, devotional videos, and regional news. The breadth reflects a genuine understanding of what users from different states, backgrounds, and age groups actually want to watch.
Technological Innovation: AI at the Core
Personalizing content across 15 languages, hundreds of content categories, and hundreds of millions of users is not a simple engineering problem. Mohalla Tech has invested heavily in AI and machine learning to make it work.
Its recommendation systems are built to learn from user behavior in real time—factoring in language preference, content type, watch time, engagement signals, and geographic context. The result is a feed that feels relevant without being intrusive, surfacing regional content that connects rather than generic viral content that performs.
Beyond recommendations, Mohalla Tech uses AI for content moderation at scale. Managing user-generated content across multiple languages requires models that can detect harmful or misleading material in Tamil as effectively as in English. This is a hard technical problem, and one that most global platforms have historically struggled with in non-English markets.
The company has also developed AI-powered tools that help creators produce higher-quality content, including video enhancement features and audio synchronization tools that lower the barrier to entry for users without professional equipment.
Business Model and Growth: Funding and Revenue Streams
Mohalla Tech has attracted significant investor interest over the years. The company has raised funding from prominent backers including Twitter (now X), Snap Inc., Tiger Global, Temasek, and Google, among others. At its peak valuation, the company was valued at approximately $5 billion, cementing its position as one of India’s most valuable consumer internet startups.
Its revenue model draws from several streams:
- Advertising: In-app ads targeted by language, region, and interest remain the primary revenue driver.
- Creator monetization: Features that allow creators to earn through virtual gifting and brand partnerships help retain top talent on the platform.
- Brand partnerships and campaigns: Regional brands, in particular, have found value in reaching highly targeted linguistic communities through ShareChat and Moj.
The focus on vernacular advertising is a key differentiator. Regional brands—from local consumer goods to political campaigns—can reach audiences that national English-language media traditionally underserves. This gives Mohalla Tech access to ad budgets that most other platforms don’t compete for.
Challenges and Competition: A Crowded Ecosystem
Growth at this scale doesn’t come without friction. Mohalla Tech operates in one of the world’s most competitive tech markets, and the challenges are both external and internal.
On the competitive side, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Josh (backed by Dailyhunt and Times Internet) all compete for the same short-video audience. Meta and Google bring enormous resources and existing user bases. Staying relevant means continuously improving product quality and creator tools.
Content moderation presents an ongoing challenge. Operating across 15 languages means misinformation, hate speech, and other harmful content can spread quickly before detection systems catch up. Investing in better moderation—both AI-driven and human—remains an operational priority.
The company has also navigated financial pressures that have led to workforce restructuring. Like many high-growth startups, balancing user growth with a path to profitability requires difficult tradeoffs. These challenges have led to layoffs at various points, reflecting broader pressures in the global tech funding environment.
Regulatory uncertainty around data privacy and social media governance in India adds another layer of complexity. As the Indian government continues refining its digital regulation framework, platforms like ShareChat and Moj will need to adapt quickly.
Where Mohalla Tech Goes From Here
The company’s forward trajectory rests on a few key priorities. First, deepening creator monetization—giving users more ways to earn directly from their content—will be critical for retention on both platforms. Second, expanding advertising capabilities, especially for small and medium regional businesses, opens a largely untapped revenue opportunity.
Internationally, there is potential for ShareChat’s model to translate to other multilingual, mobile-first markets in Southeast Asia and Africa, where similar dynamics around vernacular internet adoption are playing out. Whether Mohalla Tech pursues this expansion aggressively remains to be seen.
The Bigger Picture
Mohalla Tech’s journey reflects something important about how the internet actually grows. In most of the world, the next billion users don’t arrive speaking the same language as the last billion. They arrive with their own idioms, their own humor, their own ways of connecting—and they need platforms built for them, not adapted for them.
ShareChat and Moj were built with that understanding from day one. That’s a structural advantage that money alone can’t replicate. Whatever comes next for Mohalla Tech, the foundation is sound: a deep connection to users that most global platforms are still trying to figure out how to build.
