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Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Pratap Singh, Co-founders of Tencent and Twitter-backed social media platform ShareChat, have stepped down from their active roles in the company. The development comes within days after the unicorn laid off nearly 20% of its employees as part of cost-cutting measures. 

“After nearly eight years of building ShareChat to unicorn status and beyond, Bhanu and Farid have chosen to step down from their active roles in the company. ShareChat would not be today the company it is without their contributions,” a spokesperson for ShareChat said in a statement. 

“They will continue to be a part of the ShareChat family, with both Bhanu and Farid remaining on the board. In recent years, the company has built a strong leadership team, and many of the responsibilities held by Bhanu and Farid will now rest with Manohar Singh Charan and Gaurav Bhatia who will lead the management and engineering roles, respectively,” the statement read.

Moneycontrol first reported the development citing an internal note written by CEO Ankush Sachdeva.

Independent sources confirmed to YourStory that Co-founder Farid Ahsan stepped aside from his active role at the company in 2021. Ankush Sachdeva took over as CEO in 2017 from Farid, who was then appointed as the COO of the company. Bhanu Pratap served as the CTO of the company.

Mohalla Technologies, which owns and operates ShareChat and short video platform Moj, had let go of 420 employees earlier this month to control rising employee costs and difficulty in raising a follow-on funding round.

Founded in 2015, Mohalla Technologies was valued at $5 billion, according to data and research platform Tracxn. To date, it has raised $1.72 billion across 17 rounds of funding. It last raised $255 million from Google and Times Group in June 2022. 

The company’s total losses for FY22 stood at Rs 2,988 crore, while revenue from operations grew 4.3 times annually to Rs 347 crore. Nearly 60% of the company’s revenue comes from its advertising services.