Thirty hours. That was how long Ankush Sachdeva said it took to code Moj, the short-video app ShareChat put out in 2020. He tweeted the number himself, and it landed like a dare to every rival who had spent months on the same job.
Sachdeva and his co-founders, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan, came out of IIT Kanpur, the kind of campus that sends its graduates to Bangalore and the Valley. They did something less obvious. Mohalla Tech was incorporated in January 2015, and the product they built around it, ShareChat, assumed that the next wave of Indian internet users would not be typing in English. They would want Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and a dozen more, and they would want to talk to each other, not to a brand.
They would want Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and a dozen more, and they would want to talk to each other, not to a brand.
In 2016 ShareChat opened up to user-generated content, and the app began to look less like a messaging experiment and more like a town square. Money followed slowly, then fast. In September 2020 a group that included Twitter, Lightspeed and SAIF Partners put in $40 million. By April 2021 the company had raised about $500 million at a valuation above $2 billion.
The fights came too. In 2018 ShareChat publicly accused ByteDance of copying its design for the Helo app. A Delhi High Court direction led ByteDance to change Helo's look. A small Indian company had stared down one of the largest internet firms in the world, at least on that point.
The hard part was staying big. In May 2022 Google, the Times Group and Temasek invested $300 million at a $5 billion valuation, and ShareChat bought MX TakaTak from Times Internet for $700 million. Then the market turned. There were layoffs of 101 people in 2020, about 400 in January 2023, and about 200 in December 2023. In January 2023 Singh and Ahsan stepped down from their COO and CTO roles, leaving Sachdeva to carry the company he had started with two college friends.
The company he leads now is smaller in ambition and sharper in arithmetic. In FY25 operating revenue was about ₹723 crore, nearly flat, while the adjusted EBITDA loss fell 72 percent to about ₹219 crore. Management traded growth for unit economics and pointed to microdramas, through its QuickTV platform launched in 2025, as the next bet. Reports in 2025-26 say it is preparing for a public listing.
The lesson is not that speed wins. A 30-hour build gets you a headline. What kept ShareChat alive was the unglamorous decision, years earlier, to serve users that bigger platforms treated as an afterthought, and then the willingness, when the money stopped being free, to shrink the burn instead of the belief.