New Delhi, Oct. 17 -- Homegrown social-media platform ShareChat, which counts marquee investors such as tech giant Google, Singapore state-owned investment firm Temasek and American investment firm Tiger Global among its list of backers, cut its adjusted operating losses by 72% in the last financial year, a top executive said.

The social media platform reported Rs 219 crore (around $25 million) in adjusted Ebitda losses in fiscal year (FY) 2025, down from Rs 793 crore (around $90 million) in the year before. Adjusted Ebitda is reflection of Earnings before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization of the business without adding non-cash expenses.

"(In FY25), we focused on getting the unit economics to positivity first. Once we hit the breakeven milestone in February 2025, we started efforts to re-accelerate our revenue growth," Manohar Charan, co-founder and chief financial officer of ShareChat, said in a call with the media.

The company is now back in 'growth mode', after year-on-year (y-o-y) growth in operating revenue was nearly flat in FY25. It ended the last fiscal with an operating revenue of Rs 723.4 crore, which was about 1% higher than the previous year's number. In FY24, it had reported a 33% y-o-y growth in its operating income.

"We won't be Ebitda positive on a consolidated level this year, but we are targeting FY27," said Charan. "Even with a 30% percent cut (in operating losses) in FY26-which I am confident of-we will get into a less than 10% Ebitda loss zone," he said, adding that there's a tradeoff between revenue and Ebitda growth that the company can decide on.

Currently, ShareChat is operating at an annual run rate of Rs 1,000 crore and expecting to grow at about 30% year-on-year in the current fiscal. The startup, which operates two social media platforms ShareChat and Moj, said its core business is now-cash flow positive.

"We have built a strong core business with a large and sticky user base that allows us to invest confidently in the next phase of growth", said Ankush Sachdeva, chief executive and cofounder, ShareChat and Moj.

New growth avenues

ShareChat is now targeting growth avenues in adjacent areas where it can leverage the distribution strength of these platforms.

Sharechat generates revenue from advertising and livestreaming. Its ad-revenue fell last year by 8.1% to Rs 290 crore during the year owing to an increase in GST on real-money-gaming, while its revenue from livestreaming grew by 7.7% to Rs 434 crore. The company is expecting micro drama to be a major growth driver in the current fiscal.

"There's great opportunity in the micro drama format and we are aggressively investing in both subscription and advertising led monetization of this content," Sachdeva added.

Its micro drama vertical blends short-form storytelling with an integrated monetization model, and is simultaneously distributed as ad-supported, free-to-watch content on its two platforms and through a subscription-based model over its QuickTV app. ShareChat said QuickTV, launched in 2025, has over 15 million downloads already.

The company ventured into short-video format after the Indian government banned Chinese app TikTok in 2020. It subsequently acquired Times Internet-backed MX Taka Tak in 2021. ShareChat's last fundraising, of $40 million this September from various investors including existing ones such as Twitter, Lightspeed Ventures and SAIF Partners, was to deepen the reach of its short-video app Moj.

The startup, operated by Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd, was founded by Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan. Singh and Ahsan left the company in 2023. The company is also backed by EDBI, The Times Group, Alkeon Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures (MSV), Harbourvest, India Quotient, Mirae-Naver Asia Growth Fund, Snap, and Elevation Capital.

Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.