ShareChat, a homegrown social media platform, today announced its acquisition of Circle Internet, the hyperlocal information platform for language-first Indian internet users.

The circle was founded in 2018 by three IIT-ians Uchit Kumar, Gaurav Agrawal, and Shashank Shekhar and was backed by SAIF Partners and Venture Highway. Circle provides local information to Indian language internet users across tier-2 and 3 cities and currently has a presence in more than 120 districts across Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Kerala.

The platform brings a network of over 1,000 volunteers to contribute towards the hyperlocal content ecosystem.

Manohar Charan, VP - Corporate Development and Strategic Finance, ShareChat, said “ShareChat is growing faster than the industry, and we are investing in our capabilities to serve diverse content needs of the new users that we add to the platform. The acquisition will help us penetrate deeper into geographies and nurture a thriving hyperlocal content ecosystem that will understand and serve the latent content needs of, the next billion internet users more effectively. Circle’s hyperlocal expansion playbook complements ShareChat’s wide user base to create a strategic advantage and enhance our operational muscles to boost a community-powered content ecosystem”

With the acquisition of Circle’s business, the existing 15-member team has joined ShareChat and will be contributing towards building a language-first, community-driven user-generated hyperlocal content ecosystem.

“Circle App will continue to grow independently and empower our users to post more relevant and contextual content on the platform. Circle content can be further leveraged to diversify the content palette at ShareChat, and drive more community-driven engagements. We are really excited to have the entire Circle team on board and welcome them to ShareChat,” added Charan

“Circle was started with a vision to provide trustworthy locally relevant information to Indian language internet users. The platform evolved as an invisible thread to bridge the gaps in content being made available to non-English speaking internet users, through relevant and contextual hyperlocal content. As we intend to scale up across India and replicate the model in other forms of the content genre through a robust UGC strategy, we could not think of anyone better than ShareChat to partner in the journey. With the help of their wide reach, expertise in the language-first approach, powerful content serving algorithms, we will soon be reaching out to the majority of the districts across India. We are really excited to be a part of ShareChat," said Shashank Shekhar, CEO and Cofounder, Circle

Shashank Shekhar was heading content operations at ShareChat before he started Circle. In his new avatar, he will be heading the overall content strategy for ShareChat. As of today, ShareChat has over 130 million monthly active users, and available across 15 Indian languages.