The two co-founders of ShareChat, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan are ceasing to be actively involved in the social media startup. Ankush Sachdeva is now the sole founder and CEO of ShareChat, which was established in 2015 by the three IIT Kanpur alums.
Through Slack, Sachdeva alerted the team of this development as per reports. In accordance with the memo, Singh and Ahsan will continue to lead ShareChat and serve on the company’s board of directors.
“…we have onboarded several senior leaders in Engineering, Finance, HR, and Content Ops who Bhanu & Farid have helped in getting ramped up and become well-equipped in steering the company going forward,” Sachdeva wrote.
According to sources, a company spokesperson said, “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 Bengaluru-based company has reduced 20% of its personnel through mass firings as a result of external macro variables that have an influence on the price and accessibility of capital. The company, which is financed by Google and Twitter, terminated over 100 employees after shutting down its fantasy sports portal Jeet11.
Singh and Ahsan’s decision to leave their operating positions is unexpected given how small the firm is currently. ShareChat’s previous fundraising round valued the company at over $5 billion, but in the fiscal year that ended in March 2022, it only generated an operational income of Rs 347 crore. In FY22, the company’s losses increased 2.3X to Rs 2,988 crore.
ShareChat received more than 60% of its income from the platform’s advertising services during FY22. In FY22, their unpaid losses soared 96% to Rs 5,261 crore.
Alkeon Capital, Temasek Holdings, Moore Strategic Ventures, Tencent, and other investors have contributed over $1.18 billion to the firm.
