ShareChat, a Bengaluru-based social media startup, has raised a Series B funding round worth $18.2 million according to a company statement.

Since its founding in 2015, the company’s social media platform has allowed users to share and post text, video, GIFs and audio.

80 per cent of Indian web traffic comes from mobile devices, with videos having a majority presence, as found by the Internet Trends 2017 report by Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. This falls in line with the startup’s co-founder Farid Ahsan’s belief that Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd 2016 launch had an impact on multimedia use.

“Video consumption used to be at 10% pre-Jio, now videos contribute to around 35% of the platform’s consumption,” Ahsan told Livemint.

The Series B funding round was led by Xiaomi and Shun Wei Capital with participation from SAIF Partners, Lightspeed Partners, India Quotient and Venture Highway.

The company’s platform is available in languages including Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Malayalam with 8 million active users per month.

“Vernacular content consumption in India has witnessed a meteoric rise in the last 2 years growing from 42 million in 2011 to 234 million in 2016,” Co-founder of ShareChat, Ankush Sachdeva said in a statement. “These numbers are a great indication of the huge opportunity available for products, focused on the vernacular audience.”

Funds from the latest round will be put towards improvements and growth in terms of technical capabilities and team growth. The company will be looking to hire new employees in a variety of areas including artificial intelligence and machine learning.

ShareChat, which is run by Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd, raised $4 million in November 2016 in its Series A round.

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