ShareChat acquires Elanic to enter social commerce

Social media platform ShareChat has acquired e-commerce venture Elanic.

As part of the agreement, all Elanic employees will join ShareChat and Elanic’s founders will hold senior roles at ShareChat, a company spokesperson told TechCircle in an email.

The terms of the acquisition were undisclosed. 

The acquisition is aimed at enabling Sharechat to enter the social commerce segment as the company explores different models to monetise its platform post the 12-fold increase in the company’s losses in FY19.

In a bid to fast-track its monetisation efforts, ShareChat onboarded three senior sales executives last week, to take charge of each zone in the country. 

“The Elanic team brings with them deep insights and expertise in understanding commerce trends and consumer preferences across India. ShareChat hopes to leverage this in areas of content delivery and social commerce and positively contribute to product advancement,” the spokesperson said. 

Social commerce has been gaining momentum in the Indian ecommerce market with heavily funded players like Meesho, DealShare, BulBul, Simsim, Shop 101 and the recent entrant Paytm with the launch of MyStore.

Founded in 2015 by Ankush Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan, and Bhanu Pratap Singh, ShareChat is a social networking platform that allows users to share posts and videos in 15 native languages. It mainly competes with short video platform TikTok.

On the other hand, Elanic was founded in 2015 by IIT graduates Abhilash Narahari and Palkush Raj Chawla as a peer to peer (P2P) marketplace for fashion & lifestyle goods. According to the ShareChat spokesperson, Elanic has had over 5 million downloads with close to 1 million active listings till date.