ShareChat, India’s Meta rival, plans $400 million IPO next year

Synopsis

Social media giant ShareChat is gearing up for a potential $400 million IPO next year, marking a significant turnaround after a period of cost-cutting. The company has achieved operational profitability, driven by the booming micro-drama segment on platforms like Moj and QuickTV. With annual revenues exceeding 10 billion rupees and a strong user base, ShareChat is leveraging AI to enhance content and reduce production costs, aiming for substantial margin expansion.

Mohalla Tech Pvt., which operates social network ShareChat, short-video platform Moj and subscription-based micro-drama app QuickTV, is seeking to raise as much as $400 million from a public market listing planned for next year.

The company, commonly known as ShareChat, has become operationally profitable in the first quarter of the year that began April 2026, Chief Financial Officer Manohar Charan told Bloomberg News in an interview this week. “Our unit economics has now turned positive,” he said. “We will aim to list over the next four or five quarters.”

The IPO plans are not final and could change.

The profit and the planned listing mark a significant reversal for the firm that spent the past few years cutting costs and laying off staff as venture funding dried up after the Covid pandemic. It also sidestepped unprofitable product bets and reworked its business model to ensure that revenue exceeded the cost of serving each user.

Annual revenue at ShareChat, which counts LightSpeed and Tiger Global among its backers, has already crossed 10 billion rupees ($105 million) and is running at an annualized pace of as much as 14 billion rupees, with growth exceeding 30%.

A key driver of the company’s recovery has been micro-dramas, or serialized stories told in episodes as short as 60 seconds, that have become one of India’s fastest-growing forms of digital entertainment. The mobile-first format is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 31% to $4.5 billion by the end of 2030, according to venture fund Lumikai.

ShareChat estimates its platforms currently serve about 65 million monthly micro-drama viewers or about two-thirds of the Indian audience for the format. Users of ShareChat and its family apps are watching more than 700 million micro-drama episodes every day, said Charan.

ShareChat and Moj together have about 150 million monthly active users while QuickTV has 3 million subscribers. Though the platforms compete with Meta Platforms Inc.’s social apps, they’ve together carved out a following among India’s smaller towns and cities, where regional language content is a key differentiator from Facebook or Instagram.

Artificial intelligence already powers content recommendations, moderation, advertising and personalized content, and it’s now also helping lower the cost of producing micro-dramas. ShareChat will ramp up its in-house generative AI studio, Charan said, adding that the technology can help the company expand margins by 5% to 7% over the next two years.

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