iWorld
ShareChat’s parent company enters coveted unicorn club
KOLKATA: Mohalla Tech, the parent company of Moj and ShareChat, has become the latest entrant to the coveted unicorn club. The start-up has raised $502 million in its latest round of funding led by Lightspeed Ventures and Tiger Global, along with participation from Snap Inc, Twitter and India Quotient. With the new rounds of investment, its valuation has passed over $2.1 billion.
ShareChat CEO & co-founder Ankush Sachdeva said, “We are at an exciting inflection point in our journey, where we are going after a massive opportunity with the right team in place and the backing of long-term investors who have a deep conviction in our mission. With ShareChat & Moj, we are well-positioned to build the largest AI-powered content ecosystem in India.”
With this infusion of capital, the company is looking at aggressively growing its user base, strengthen our creator community, AI-powered recommendation engine and platform health, added Sachdeva.
Tiger Global partner Scott Shleifer said, “As internet penetration increases, ShareChat’s leading content creation platform is poised to expand dramatically by bridging into online purchases of goods and services. Additionally, Moj is well-positioned to seize the opportunity presented by the growth of short video in India. We are impressed with the team’s understanding of these rapidly evolving technologies and its ability to execute quickly, and we are excited to partner with them as they continue to build a great company.”
Lightspeed Venture Partners partner Ravi Mhatre said, "We are excited to witness the market-leading growth of Sharechat's short video product Moj over the past year, with adoption in metro cities, towns and villages across the length and breadth of India. Lightspeed globally is honoured to double down on its partnership with Sharechat to build one of India's iconic consumer Internet companies."
Lightspeed has backed the start-up in every Series A investment round since 2016.
Founded in 2015, Mohalla Tech has now successfully raised over $766 million across six fundraising rounds, enabling ShareChat to substantially grow and differentiate itself by delivering a unique, tech-led social media experience. Furthermore, Moj, which launched in July 2020, has already made huge strides towards leadership in the short video space. Moj and ShareChat together, with a 280 million-strong user community, envision building a cohesive AI-powered content ecosystem to address India’s growing digital needs.
iWorld
Bill Ackman makes a $64bn bid for Universal Music Group
The hedge fund boss wants to list the world’s biggest record label in New York and thinks he knows exactly what ails it
NEW YORK: Bill Ackman wants to buy the world’s biggest record label. Pershing Square Capital Management, the hedge fund run by the billionaire investor, submitted a non-binding proposal on Tuesday to acquire all outstanding shares of Universal Music Group in a business combination transaction worth roughly $64.4 billion (around 55.8 billion euros).
Under the terms of the offer, UMG shareholders would receive 9.4 billion euros in cash, equivalent to 5.05 euros per share, plus 0.77 shares of a newly created company, dubbed New UMG, for each share held. Pershing Square values the total package at 30.40 euros per share, a 78 per cent premium to UMG’s closing price on April 2.
The deal would see UMG merge with Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, with the combined entity incorporating as a Nevada corporation and listing on the New York Stock Exchange. New UMG would publish financial statements under US GAAP and become eligible for S&P 500 index inclusion. Pershing Square says the transaction is expected to close by year-end, with all equity financing backstopped by Ackman’s firm and its affiliates, and all debt financing committed at signing. The transaction would cancel 17 per cent of UMG’s outstanding shares, leaving New UMG with 1.541 billion shares outstanding.
Ackman has a long history with UMG. Pershing Square first bought approximately 10 per cent of the company from Vivendi in the summer of 2021 for around $4 billion, around the time of UMG’s listing on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange. He has since trimmed that position, raising around $1.4 billion from the sale of a 2.7 per cent stake in March 2025, and resigned from UMG’s board in May 2025, citing new executive and board obligations arising from recent investments.
His diagnosis of UMG’s troubles is blunt. The company’s stock has fallen around 33 per cent over the past twelve months on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange, and Ackman lays out six reasons why. These include uncertainty around the Bolloré Group’s 18 per cent stake in the company, the postponement of UMG’s US listing, the underutilisation of UMG’s balance sheet, the absence of a publicly disclosed capital allocation plan and earnings algorithm, a failure to reflect UMG’s 2.7 billion euro stake in Spotify in its valuation, and what Ackman calls suboptimal shareholder investor relations, communications and engagement.
The Bolloré stake has long cast a shadow over the company. Cyrille Bolloré stepped down from UMG’s board in July 2025 as the Bolloré Group battled the French financial markets regulator over its stake in Vivendi, which holds a further capital interest in UMG. UMG had confidentially filed a draft registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in July 2025 for a proposed secondary listing in America, but put those plans on hold in March 2026, citing market conditions.
Ackman has kind words for UMG’s management, at least. “Since UMG’s listing, Lucian Grainge and the company’s management have done an excellent job nurturing and continuing to build a world-class artist roster and generating strong business performance,” he said. But he made his diagnosis plain: “UMG’s stock price has languished due to a combination of issues that are unrelated to the performance of its music business and importantly, all of them can be addressed with this transaction.”
In other words, Ackman believes UMG is a great business trapped inside a broken structure. If the board agrees, he intends to fix that, loudly and in New York.
