There is a cleaner version of Ankush Sachdeva’s startup story than the one that often circulates on social media.
It is not simply that he failed 17 times and succeeded on the eighteenth.
The more reliable account is messier, and more interesting.
While studying at IIT Kanpur, Sachdeva and future co-founders Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Pratap Singh spent years building products that mostly went nowhere. ShareChat’s own historical account says they built 14 products in college that failed to get off the ground. An earlier report from 2017 said the trio worked on 17 projects in total, 14 of which failed. Later versions of the story have often compressed those two figures into the claim that Sachdeva suffered 17 startup failures. That interpretation is not the best supported by the founders’ own accounts.
What matters more than the precise number is what happened next.
Instead of arriving at ShareChat through a carefully prepared business plan, the three founders noticed something unusual in the way Indians were using Facebook and WhatsApp. People were publicly sharing phone numbers to join interest-based WhatsApp groups, then exchanging jokes, images, devotional messages and videos in Indian languages.
That behaviour pointed to an audience the mainstream social internet was not serving particularly well.
More than a decade later, ShareChat has grown into a substantial consumer-internet business. Its parent, Mohalla Tech, operates ShareChat, short-video platform Moj and newer products such as QuickTV. ShareChat's current website lists more than 110 million monthly active users for the ShareChat app and more than 100 million for Moj.
The journey from failed experiments to that scale was less a story of one brilliant idea than of repeatedly watching how users behaved and changing direction when the evidence demanded it.
Before ShareChat, There Were Years of Experiments
Sachdeva studied computer science and engineering at IIT Kanpur, graduating in 2015. IIT Kanpur records that he completed an internship at Microsoft in 2014 before co-founding ShareChat with Ahsan and Singh.
The three had met earlier during a Yahoo Hack U event while they were students. ShareChat's own account says the meeting happened in 2012 and led to a series of experiments built from their college hostels.
Those projects varied widely.
Accounts from the founders describe experiments including a real-estate product, anonymous messaging concepts and a debate platform. One early product reportedly attracted tens of thousands of users but failed to become a scalable business.
This is where the often-repeated failure count becomes confusing.
In a first-person company post, Sachdeva said the team built 14 products while in college and failed 14 times to get them off the ground. ShareChat has also described the successful company as the founders' 15th startup attempt.
A 2017 account, however, said the group had worked on 17 projects, 14 of which failed. That may explain why later articles began referring to 17 failures.
For a factual history, the safer conclusion is that the trio experimented extensively, with 14 failed products clearly supported by direct founder accounts, while the broader tally of projects has been reported differently.
The ShareChat Idea Came From Watching Users
The breakthrough did not begin with a formal market study.
In late 2014, while trying to attract users to another product, Sachdeva was looking through Facebook groups. He came across a community built around cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar where users were publicly posting their phone numbers so they could be added to WhatsApp groups.
Sachdeva has recalled collecting about 1,000 numbers and creating multiple WhatsApp groups around content such as Tendulkar photos and videos.
The response was immediate.
Users began filling the groups with messages, pictures and videos, much of it in Indian languages. What caught the founders' attention was not merely the volume of activity but the type of behaviour: strangers were actively seeking communities where they could consume and exchange locally relevant content outside an English-first internet experience.
ShareChat's official timeline dates that discovery to November 2014.
Mohalla Tech Private Limited, the company that would become ShareChat's parent, was incorporated in January 2015, and the ShareChat app officially launched in October 2015 in Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi.
That timeline also explains why different sources sometimes describe ShareChat as having been founded in either 2014 or 2015. The underlying consumer insight emerged in late 2014, while the company was incorporated and the product formally launched in 2015.
Building for Indian Languages Rather Than Translating English
ShareChat's early strategy was built around a simple observation: millions of Indians were coming online without necessarily wanting English to be the default language of their social lives.
The company did not treat regional-language content as an additional setting attached to an English-first platform. Its product was designed around Indian-language communities from the beginning.
As usage grew, ShareChat expanded beyond its original four languages.
By March 2018 it had added Bhojpuri, Haryanvi, Rajasthani and Assamese, according to the company's official history. The wider ShareChat and Moj ecosystem today operates across 15 Indian languages.
That focus became particularly relevant as smartphone and mobile-data adoption expanded beyond India's largest cities.
By September 2017, ShareChat had reached 4 million monthly active users. By March 2019, that number had grown to 45 million.
The company has since diversified beyond the original social feed, adding private communication, live video, creator tools and short-form entertainment.
Moj Changed the Scale of the Business
A major shift came in July 2020, when ShareChat launched Moj, its short-video platform.
Moj became a second major consumer product under Mohalla Tech and substantially expanded the company's overall audience.
ShareChat's own current figures list more than 110 million monthly active users on ShareChat and more than 100 million on Moj. The company separately says ShareChat has a creator community exceeding 1.5 million, while Moj has more than 550,000 creators.
Those are company-reported metrics rather than independently audited audience figures, so they should be read as such.
The numbers are also lower than some historical combined-user claims. In 2023, ShareChat said its products had more than 325 million monthly active users, with about 180 million on ShareChat and 160 million on Moj. Its current website now reports smaller platform-level MAUs.
That change is useful context: startup scale is not always a straight line, and historical peak figures should not automatically be presented as current usage.
Funding Turned ShareChat Into a Multibillion-Dollar Startup
ShareChat's growth attracted a long list of institutional investors.
The company says it raised $913 million during 2021, reaching a valuation of $3.7 billion by the end of that year. In June 2022, it said another $255 million raised across multiple tranches took its valuation to $5 billion.
That $5 billion valuation is the source of many online descriptions converting ShareChat's value into roughly ₹40,000 crore.
But it is important to date the figure.
The $5 billion valuation belongs to 2022. It should not be presented as though it were necessarily ShareChat's current valuation in 2026.
Private-company valuations are normally established through financing transactions, and they can change significantly between rounds.
ShareChat later turned to a different kind of funding. In April 2024 it raised $49 million through convertible debentures from existing investors including Lightspeed, Temasek, Alkeon Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures and HarbourVest. By August 2024, the round had expanded to $65 million after Singapore-based EDBI joined.
The structure mattered because convertible debentures are not the same as a conventional equity round establishing a new valuation.
Growth Was Followed by a Push Toward Sustainable Economics
ShareChat's story after the period of rapid fundraising became increasingly focused on economics rather than user growth alone.
For FY24, the company reported revenue of ₹718 crore, up 33% from ₹540 crore in FY23. Adjusted EBITDA losses narrowed to ₹793 crore, from approximately ₹2,400 crore a year earlier.
In FY25, revenue edged up to ₹723 crore, while adjusted EBITDA losses fell another 72% to ₹219 crore, according to company figures released in October 2025. ShareChat also said its core business had become cash-flow positive.
More recently, the company's current corporate page says annual revenue has crossed ₹1,000 crore, with positive unit economics. It also says it expects 30% growth in FY27. The growth target is management's expectation, not a completed financial result.
The change in emphasis is telling.
The earlier phase of ShareChat's life was dominated by language expansion, audience acquisition and venture funding. The newer phase is centred more heavily on monetisation, advertising technology, subscriptions and controlling costs.
ShareChat Is Expanding Beyond Its Original Social Feed
The company is also trying to build new revenue streams around the audience it already has.
In 2025, Mohalla Tech introduced QuickTV, a subscription-focused micro-drama platform. The company has since brought short episodic storytelling into ShareChat and Moj as well.
ShareChat's current corporate page lists QuickTV with more than 7.3 million subscribers and 50 million downloads, again based on company-reported data.
AI has also become increasingly important behind the scenes.
In January 2025, ShareChat opened an AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore focused on areas including recommendation systems, advertising personalisation and content moderation. The company said ShareChat and Moj then had a combined reach of more than 325 million users across 15 Indian languages.
These moves suggest that Mohalla Tech increasingly sees its advantage not simply as running one regional-language social network, but as owning technology and distribution capable of supporting several forms of digital entertainment.
The Founding Story Is Really About User Behaviour
It is easy to turn Sachdeva's story into a motivational slogan: fail repeatedly, keep trying and eventually build a multibillion-dollar company.
That version leaves out the more useful lesson.
The founders did not succeed simply because they refused to quit.
They changed what they were building after noticing something their previous products had missed.
The decisive insight was sitting in plain sight inside Facebook comments and WhatsApp groups: large numbers of people wanted social content organised around their own languages, interests and cultural habits.
ShareChat was built around that behaviour.
That also helps explain why the earlier failures mattered. The founders had spent years launching products, watching adoption and discovering what users did not want. When a genuinely unusual behaviour appeared, they had enough product experience to recognise it.
Persistence mattered, but observation mattered just as much.
ShareChat's Story Is Still Being Written
It would be equally misleading to describe ShareChat's journey as a finished success story.
The company has gone through periods of rapid expansion, substantial losses, restructuring and a shift toward tighter financial discipline.
Its audience figures have changed. Its business model has expanded from advertising into live consumer transactions and subscription entertainment. Its historic $5 billion valuation dates from 2022 and should not be confused with a freshly established 2026 valuation.
Yet the business has also survived a difficult transition from venture-funded growth toward improving unit economics.
ShareChat currently reports more than 110 million monthly active users on its core platform, while Moj has more than 100 million. It says annual revenue has crossed ₹1,000 crore and its core business is cash positive.
That is a very different company from the WhatsApp experiment the founders ran while still at IIT Kanpur.
Conclusion
The story of Ankush Sachdeva and ShareChat is often packaged around a memorable number of failures.
The underlying record deserves a little more care.
Direct founder accounts say Sachdeva, Ahsan and Singh built 14 unsuccessful products before ShareChat. Another early account says they worked on 17 projects overall, 14 of which failed. The widely repeated claim of "17 failed startups" appears to simplify that history beyond what the strongest sources support.
What is not disputed is the persistence behind those experiments.
The three IIT Kanpur students kept building until they found a behaviour worth following: Indians seeking communities and content in their own languages.
From that observation came Mohalla Tech in 2015, the ShareChat app later that year, Moj in 2020 and a company that eventually reached a $5 billion valuation during its 2022 funding cycle.
The next phase has been less glamorous but arguably just as important: reducing losses, finding sustainable revenue and proving that a large Indian social platform can turn reach into a durable business.
ShareChat's story is therefore not simply about rejection followed by success.
It is about repeated experimentation, a sharp observation about India's internet audience and the difficult work of turning that insight into a company that has lasted far beyond the startup stage.
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