Google-backed is back with more job cuts in its third round of layoffs in three months. This time, the social media platform’s live commerce division is bearing the brunt.
ShareChat, which is run by Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd., has scaled down its live commerce division as the company shifts focus to becoming profitable.
“Live commerce is an important, long-term strategic bet for us and we shall continue to invest in scaling it over time. However, in the immediate term, we have calibrated the budget outlay for this area. That said, it’s far from being shut down,” a ShareChat spokesperson said.
In January this year, ShareChat let go of about 420 people out of 2,100 employees, and in December 2022, the company let go of 5% workforce when it axed Jeet11, its fantasy gaming offering.
Founded in 2015 by IIT-Kanpur graduates Ankush Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan, and Bhanu Pratap Singh, ShareChat is a social media platform that operates in various regional languages, including Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu.
In 2017 and 2018, the platform quickly became the poster child for non-English content apps, attracting investments from Shunwei Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Twitter became an investor in 2019, while Tencent pumped in money in 2022.
Tiger Global led the company’s Series E round in April 2021, where the investment giant pumped in $502 million. The funding helped ShareChat achieve a $2.1 billion post-money valuation and a ticket to the unicorn club. ShareChat also raised another $520 million, adding Google and Times Group as an investor in June 2022.
But since the latter half of 2022, raising funds has become challenging for startups. Investor caution due to the Ukraine-Russia war and the crash of big tech companies on the stock market, amid many other factors, has made capital less readily available. This has made many tech startups take note of their inflated spending and save costs for long-term survival.
“We are razor focused on our monetisation efforts going into 2023. As part of our 2023 plans, we’ve realigned resources on projects with a higher weight on immediate wins either in the form of increased revenue or reduced costs,” said a ShareChat spokesperson.
