ShareChat sets up Silicon Valley centre, appoints new product exec

Vernacular social media platform ShareChat has opened a centre of excellence (CoE) in Palo Alto, its first establishment outside India.

Dubbed as ShareChat Labs, the new facility will be dedicated to building a technology backbone for the company with an aim to bring cutting edge tech, developed by the best to its community of users, according to a statement.

 Operated by Bengaluru-based Mohalla Tech, ShareChat claims to have over 160 million users across 15 Indian languages.

With the new CoE, ShareChat aims to focus on innovation and building new-age solutions powered by machine learning, to enhance user experience through advanced camera capabilities, deeper visual understanding of the images, videos and stronger content recommendation, the statement added.

ShareChat has also appointed former product leader at Uber, Gaurav Mishra as SVP- Product, who spearheaded Uber AI, data, and marketplace platforms. In his new role, Mishra will oversee the product development at multiple levels for ShareChat and its short video platform, Moj and, focus on growing a high performing product team with expertise in consumer product and machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“Mishra is a proven product leader with over 20 years of experience in the consumer technology space. He will be a driving force towards strengthening content feed and personalization, building advanced product capabilities and reinforcing the robustness of our ad-tech platform,” Ankush Sachdeva, CEO and co-founder of ShareChat said.

Mishra co-founded Guruji.com, a search engine in regional language that was built for India. The company was later acquired by e-commerce major Flipkart.

“As we set-up ShareChat Labs to develop ground breaking technology solutions to accelerate our ambition of building the most sophisticated content creation and distribution engine, we believe the talent ecosystem available in the Valley is going to play a major role” Sachdeva said.

ShareChat recently secured $40 million in a growth round to promote its short video platform Moj.