ShareChat parent mohalla tech eyes $400 million IPO next year after turning operationally profitable

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Mohalla Tech Pvt., the parent company behind vernacular social network ShareChat, short-video platform Moj, and subscription-based micro-drama app QuickTV, is planning a public market listing next year to raise up to $400 million. Chief Financial Officer Manohar Charan said in an interview that the company was operationally profitable in the first quarter of the fiscal year that starts April 2026 and is looking at an Initial Public Offering in the next four to five quarters, though the timeline is flexible.

The firm’s turnaround has been driven by a strategic shift to micro-dramas, serialised stories released in ultra-short 60-second episodes. ShareChat estimates that its family of apps currently services 65 million monthly micro-drama viewers, commanding roughly two-thirds of India’s total audience for this fast-growing digital entertainment format. According to Charan, users across their ecosystem watch more than 700 million micro-drama episodes daily, a booming sector projected by venture fund Lumikai to touch $4.5 billion by 2030.

To further lower production costs for these micro-dramas and scale operations, the company is ramping up its in-house generative artificial intelligence studio. Artificial intelligence is already heavily integrated across ShareChat’s platforms to handle content recommendations, moderation, advertising, and hyper-personalized content feeds. The company expects generative AI to help boost its profit margins by 5 to 7 percent in the next two years.

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This financial turnaround is a huge win for Mohalla Tech, which spent the post-pandemic years aggressively cutting costs, laying off staff and ditching unprofitable product bets as venture funding dried up. Marquee investors like LightSpeed and Tiger Global-backed ShareChat has already crossed ₹10 billion in annual revenue and is currently at an annualised run-rate of up to ₹14 billion, growing at a rate of over 30%.

ShareChat and Moj combined have about 150 million monthly active users and QuickTV, its premium micro-drama vertical, has amassed 3 million subscribers. ShareChat’s localised ecosystem has created a deep defensive moat among users in tier-2 and tier-3 towns in India, where regional language content faces fierce competition from global behemoths such as Facebook and Instagram.

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