ShareChat acquires Elanic, foray into social commerce

ShareChat has acquired Elanic - a fashion peer-to-peer marketplace, with an idea is to foray into the world of social commerce through Elanic as ShareChat looks at different models to monetize on its platform, added the people cited above.

Bengaluru-based Elanic Funded in 2015 by IT graduates Palkush Rai Chawla, Aditi Rohan and Abhilash Narahari, Was Routed Through The Investment Subsidiary Of Digital Garage, DG Incubation. The P2P Fashion ( Elanic) marketplace raises funding from Japan based digital garage. The deal already went through a few months ago and the Elanic team is now working out of the ShareChat office. They are experimenting with different ways to use commerce on their app.

ShareChat’s co-founder and chief executive Ankush Sachdeva confirmed that the Elanic team has joined them. This development comes just weeks after the news of ShareChat’s foray into fantasy gaming through a separate app Jeet11. These moves mark the Twitter-backed startup’s attempt to explore different avenues of monetisation after receiving criticism for high cash burn and no revenue model in sight. The company had posted zero operational revenue in the last fiscal alongside a loss of Rs 414 crore.

We acquired talent and certain IPs from the Elanic business and we see areas of great innovation from our acquihire in areas of content delivery and commerce, Sachdeva said .

ShareChat’s foray into social commerce is expected to increase the frequency of visitors on the app as commerce after garnering a user base of over 60 million monthly active users (MAUs) across 15 vernacular languages who, ShareChat claims, spend 23-25 minutes on average on the platform per day.

“One of the potential ways its social commerce layer would work is that the resellers of existing social commerce companies such as Meesho will post on ShareChat to get customers. Some of the resellers have already started posting on it.

Sources say it was a distress sale where the founders made very little money.With the aspiration of ShareChat in social commerce, the competition in the space is expected to heat up.