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ShareChat Raises a $100 Mn in a Twitter Led Funding Round

Leave a Comment / India, News, Product, Social media, start-up, Tech News / By

After a long struggle, India has also become home to many creative and useful startups, and even the global tech companies agree with that. Following that very fact, Twitter, one of the biggest technology company, just closed the D series funding as the lead for a four years old Indian company ShareChat.

Where Twitter led the funding, major investment brands including TrustBridge Partners, Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient and Morningside Venture Capital took part in the investments, among which a few are the company’s existing investors. With the latest round of funding, the company was able to raise a $100 million, and with that, the company now values at about $650 million. Till now, the company has raised around $224 million.

ShareChat is an Indian social network that allows people to chat in the regional languages. This is the reason why despite tens of popular chat apps, ShareChat has grown to tens of million users in just four years. Twitter also sees the potential in the startup that is why it took the privilege to lead the funding for the company.

sharechat
Image Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

There has been no statement from Sharechat on the matter. But the managing director of Twitter India, Manish Maheshwari said in a statement, “Twitter and ShareChat are aligned on the broader purpose of serving the public conversation, helping the world learn faster and solve common challenges. This investment will help ShareChat grow and provide the company’s management team access to Twitter’s executives as thought partners.”

Twitter just appointed Manish Maheshwari in April 2019 for its India office after it started facing a decline in its growth in India. After his appointment in Twitter, Maheshwari has said in a statement, “With premium Indian content on the rise in multiple regions across the country, I believe we are scratching the surface of what’s possible with Twitter in India.”

ShareChat supports almost every regional language except English, which has been the unique feature to attract its 60 million users to the platform. And, the company has no plans to change that in the coming future. So investing in ShareChat can be a step forward for the company to expand its limits to different regions, regional languages and people from different background.

kik

Ted Livingston : The Journey of the Founder of Kik Messenger

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Establishing a new innovative start-up is the ultimate dream of every young entrepreneur out there. And, especially, if a mind has both excellent technical skills and impressive business strategies, wonders can be created. But, how many of us realize that the real voyage begins after one has accomplished his or her dreams? Because with great power comes great responsibilities. Reaching the zenith is easier than holding onto it. It is obvious that one will face ups and downs during the entire journey of success, but one must be strong enough to not give up or choose a wrong path.

Ted Livingston, founder of Kik Messenger and an incredible tech genius, was sentenced to death in 9th June 2019 for committing fraud, drug trafficking and an endless chain of illegal activities. He confessed all of his crimes saying that he did everything to save his company from bankruptcy, though the press release gives enough evidence of Kik’s short-term success. He started the company after he was rejected by RIM (Research in Motion), which led him to join the Velocity program, and finally, open his own start-up. So, let’s have a look into Livingston’s life before he hit such a massive crisis.

Early Life

Livingston was born in 1987, in Toronto, Ontario to a prosperous family. His father was a financial advisor, and his mother worked in the advertising sector. From a very young age, Livingston showed a great interest in building robots, and he joined the robotics team of his school. He went to Crescent School in Toronto and graduated from there in 2005.

Higher Studies and Early Career

Ted Livingston founder kik
Image Source: Twitter

Livingston pursued a Bachelor’s degree in mechatronics at the University of Waterloo, but he dropped out later. During his time at the university, he took part in the Waterloo co-op program and landed placements at Honda and City of Toronto Government.

In 2007, he started working as a Systems Engineering Project Coordinator at RIM, and then, as a Technical Product Management Coordinator. The internship was a part of his engineering course, and, Livingston once said about it that the best part about the internship was having a smartphone with a full data plan which was very expensive at that time.

Since he acquired a very lucrative position at RIM, during his internship, he got to work with every product manager individually and learnt a lot of new things. He was so good at his job that his boss advised him not to go for a full-time job in RIM and rather open his own company. This was all the motivation he needed, and hence, he turned down the job at RIM in 2008.

Founding KiK

Ted went back to Waterloo to complete his Bachelor’s degree, but somehow he ended up participating in the Velocity program followed by founding KiK. At first, Livingston created KiK Music, which was then known as Unsycned for RIM (later known as Blackberry). The app was connected to BBM to allow users to share soundtracks via messenger. But, KiK had bigger plans, which were blatantly turned down by RIM. So, Livingston and his team started working on the Kik messaging app on their own, and it was released on 19th October 2010.

While messaging apps like WhatsApp and Ping were already ruling the market, KiK hit one million users within 15 days of its release. Pretty impressive for an infant company, isn’t it? Though KiK was initially released for iOS and BlackBerry, BlackBerry removed it in November 2010 from BlackBerry App World followed by filing a lawsuit against KiK, which was settled later in 2013.

Success of KiK

In 2014, KiK raised $38.3 million from Series C funding followed by $50 million in the next year, thus resulting in KiK’s total worth to $1 billion. Gradually, KiK decided to raise funding in cryptocurrencies, and it raised $125 million cryptocurrencies through an ICO in September 2017.

In June 2018, Kin Coin (for cryptocurrencies) was released officially in Beta version, and in the next month, Kinit Beta App was released which was exclusively for the US residents.

Death Sentence of Livingston

The news of Livingston’s death sentence hit like an unexpected jolt to the world. He was accused of multiple reasons which included conduction of an illegal ICO, drug trafficking, prostitution and fraud. And finally, he was given a death sentence by an SEC Commission.

Arumugam and A Gopinath

Arumugam : An Indian YouTuber in his Sixties, Influencing Viewers with his Unique Cooking

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YouTube has been a blessing for the content creators, and for those, who had never thought that they would face the camera. Now, millions of people are seeing and liking them. In the past five years, YouTube has changed the lives of millions of content creators from different fields, including music, dance, acting makeup, fashion, travelling as well as cooking. One such content creator and one of the most viewed YouTuber is Arumugam. Though the channel is created by his son, A Gopinath, the protagonist of the channel is Arumugam.

A Gopinath is a native of Tiruppur, a small town near Coimbatore in western Tamil Nadu. He earned a diploma in electronics and communication at the age of 20 and started working at a local cable service provider. He then moved to Chennai and began to work for a nameologist, where he edited and uploaded videos on YouTube for the company. After a few months, he left the job at the nameologist and joined the Tamil film industry. He worked as an assistant director in a few small-budget Tamil films, but none of his films got to see the face of daylight. After struggling in the field of film-making for over four years, he returned back to his village in 2016.

Gopinath’s father Arumugam, a building painter, most of the time used to cook food for his family as his wife worked as a full-time tailor in a garment factory. Gopinath had already seen many cookery videos on YouTube. So, looking at his father cooking, the 27-years old Gopinath decided to film his father and put his video on YouTube. For that, he created a channel named ‘Village Food Factory’.

Arumugam and A Gopinath
Image Source: theweekendleader.com

Gopinath made videos of his father cooking food and edited it accordingly. The videos went viral in no time, and people started liking the content. The uniqueness of the content grabbed the attention of most of the people, as Arumugam did not cook the food in a fancy kitchen with ultra-modern tools, but in an open place in the farms and jungle, that too with limited resources.

Arumugam sets up a traditional homely earthen stove and big wide utensils to cook the food. The channel received huge appreciation from its audience. In fact, by November 2016, the duo uploaded over 42 videos on the channel that gained over 66000 subscribers for the channel. In a span of four-five months, the channel had also gained over 30 million views and earned over 2.5 lakh rupees.

According to Arumugam, he received an 8000 rupees cheque the very first time as the earning from his videos, followed by a 45000 rupees cheque in the next month, and the number continued to increase.

To make the videos look better every single time, the father-son duo keeps changing the locations and try to add new-unique elements to it. Arumugam’s wife and his younger son also help him with his videos.

The family is entirely focussed on the channel, where Gopinath’s wife and mother do the pre-cooking preparation, Gopinath films the video and edits it, whereas his father and brother cook in the video. There is minimal talk in the video, but the detailed cooking helps the audience to see the whole process properly. The channel has helped the father-son duo reach even the international audience. According to Gopinath, one day a white man recognised his father in a flight and praised his work.

Gopinath intends to make this channel his full-time job and has already covered over 25% of south Indian dishes in the videos. Currently, the father-son are posting one video a week. The future plans of the two include establishing a restaurant in their native place.

YouTube has become the biggest source of income for many content creators. The idea like Village Food Factory is getting popular among people for its rawness and authenticity. Village Food Factory is among the top ten food channels in India, and currently, has over 250 videos and 3 million subscribers.

Instagram down

Instagram Goes Down Again; Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter Also Faces the Outage

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Reportedly, the major social media apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Twitter, went down for over an hour on Wednesday at 8:45 a.m. ET. The users of these apps around the world reported issues while downloading and sending images, audios, and videos for some time.

It has become quite common for Instagram to go down, in the past few months. But this time, the other three prime apps, FB, Twitter, and Whatsapp, were also facing the same issues at the same time.

Instagram down
Image Source: telegraph.co

Every time the users were trying to see an Instagram post, it was showing the error, “Couldn’t refresh feed” or “Couldn’t load the image. Tap to retry”. Though, the app was able to load the caption under it. Same issues went with Whatsapp multimedia sending and downloading, whereas Facebook was unable to publish the posts.

Twitter users, on the other hand, were unable to direct message. It was showing notification of unread messages, even after the users read the message.

Facebook, while facing these issues, said on the behalf of all its apps in a report, “During one of our routine maintenance operations, we triggered an issue that is making it difficult for some people to upload or send photos and videos. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Where Facebook gave a proper explanation for its app going down, Twitter did not say anything on what caused the issue. But after resolving the issue, Twitter took it to its support handle and wrote, “almost at 100% resolved. There may be some residual effects for a small group of people, but overall your DMs should be working properly now. We appreciate your patience!”

Around 8 p.m. ET, Facebook also said, “The issue has since been resolved and we should be back at 100% for everyone.”

Instagram has been facing such troubles quite often. Last time, it was three weeks ago when the platform faced the interruptions, that too for two hours. Before the four apps went down yesterday, apps like OKCupid, Peloton, Feedly, Discord and DownDetector have also gone down the day before yesterday, after an outage at Cloudflare.

Sean Rad : The Founding Memeber and Former CEO of Tinder

Founder, Social media, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Digitalization has made every activity so convenient for us that we can literally do anything with a swipe of our fingers. Moreover, the younger generation prefers doing everything through the internet, starting from shopping, payment, booking shows, and even, finding a perfect date unless they happen to meet under the mistletoe. Now, how great it would be to use a mobile app where you can find a perfect match only by swiping left or right? Tinder is one such mobile dating app, using which you can chat with other users and find a ‘good match’ for yourself.

The app provides the option to swipe right if you like someone’s profile and the other way around if you don’t like any. The app was launched in 2012, and in less than a couple of months, it grew to a million users. Tinder was founded by Sean Rad, along with Justin Mateen, Jonathan Badeen and many other executive members. Rad was also the former CEO of the company. One of the founding members, Whitney Wolfe, left Tinder after some time to work on another dating app, Bumble.

Early Life

Born into an Iranian family, Rad moved to Los Angeles with his parents in 1970s and settled in Beverly Hills. His parents worked in the technology industry, which might be one reason why he knew tech very well. Since his childhood, Rad was passionate about doing something big in life and making his life worthy.

Sean Rad
Image Source: businessinsider.in

When Rad was in high school, he did an internship as an entertainment manager, and that’s how he realized that he can make money even from the things he enjoyed doing. Though Rad and Mateen went to different schools, they knew each other since they were fourteen.

Higher Education and Career

Rad started pioneering in the world of technology since he was just eighteen and launched Orgoo, his first startup that was envisioned to build a webmail service. Both Rad and Mateen went to the University of Southern California, but Rad dropped out after a couple of years, to explore the entrepreneurial world and developed a platform called Adly, in the mid-2000s.

These two young entrepreneurs, along with other members, launched Tinder in 2012 and promoted the app heavily in various college campuses. They knew very well, where they could grab the most attention, and thus, gained a billion swipes per day, within a couple of years of Tinder.

Success of Tinder

A year after the release of Tinder, the app received TechCrunch’s Crunchie Award for ‘Best New Startup of 2013’. In March 2013, the company realised the application was used only in a few localities, and hence, Alexa Mateen, social media director, promoted it in other college campuses as well. And by May 2013, Tinder became one of the top twenty-five social networking apps on the basis of users. The frequency of users kept rising, which made Tinder the first online dating app as one of the top five online utilized applications.

In 2014 Webby Awards, the company was named as ‘breakout of the year’, and by October 2014, the application finally incorporated swiping motion and processed more than a billion swipes per day. It made around twelve million matches per day, which is appreciable for a company, which is only two years old. In 2015, the company launched a new feature to let the user access the profiles they rejected earlier, but chatting of two users was only possible when both of them swiped right. Apart from this, a lot of new features were added and deleted from the app in 2015. Tinder’s main complementing site was Facebook, as the user needed to connect their Facebook account with the app for profile verification.

In September 2016, Tinder came in partnership with Vina, a social networking app, and tested ‘Tinder Boost’ in Australia. In October 2016, it went live around the world, which basically, allowed your profile to be on top in your area for 30 minutes. In the same month, Tinder announced the opening of their first office in Silicon Valley, such that to enhance the quality of the employees. In November 2016, the app introduced more freedom on the grounds of choosing gender, breaking the typical mindset of society. This feature raised the number of users by a hefty amount, and by 2018, Tinder had over 3.7 million paid subscribers. The company is now deciding to launch a lighter version of the app, called Tinder Lite, which will take relatively less storage space and consume lesser data.

Majority of the Tinder, today, is under the acquisition of IAC and its subsidiary, Match Group. Till 2018, Rad changed positions quite a number of times, stepping down from the position of CEO and getting back in the helm again. But, in August 2018 a lawsuit was filed against IAC by a group of Tinder employees including Rad. They are suing IAC of alleged stock information and seeking at least $2billion in damages.

Amazon Closes Down Spark Before it Completes its Two Years Anniversary

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Most of the people might not know, but approximately two years ago, Amazon had launched a social networking platform named Spark. And since it has not made it to the global audience, it seems, Amazon has shut the platform down, even before it completes its two year anniversary.

Amazon Spark
Image Source: sownagency.com

Amazon Spark was a similar platform to most of the other social media platforms, where users could post pictures, stories and could connect with people. One of the most important features, that Amazon had added to it, was the ability to sell and purchase things over it. The app was launched in a hope that people will come to the app through their influencers and will make purchases, accordingly. Users were even allowed to tag the products available on the Amazon website.

Like Instagram, the users could react to the posts through smiles and post comments on it. In fact, Spark was considered as one of the competitors of Instagram. But the platform was primarily developed for the Amazon Prime members and was focused more on shopping and sales.

“Whether you’re looking for inspiration for home décor or seeking advice for the best long-distance running shoes, Spark makes it easy to discover and shop stories and ideas from a community that likes what you like.” Amazon has said during the launch of Spark in 2017.

Though the platform entirely focused on sales and shopping, it had copied a few features from its rival Instagram, like the posts from fashion and travel bloggers. But the problem was that it was restricted to only the Prime members, and only they were able to use it. The reach of the platform was limited, and the users did not have anyone familiar to connect with over this very platform.

Though Amazon has not given any statement on the matter, meanwhile the link to Amazon Spark is redirecting to #FoundItOnAmazon site, one of the other easy shopping tools from Amazon. Earlier the Amazon’s notification section had been changed for including updates from Spark. But now the navigation has once again been simplified.