ShareChat acquires video production company HPF Films

ShareChat on Wednesday announced it has acquired video production company HPF Films. The Indian social media company said the acquisition will help build a better content ecosystem with an equal focus on the creator community.

With the acquisition, HPF Films’ 25-member team has joined ShareChat. The team is working towards developing content operations, digital marketing, and creator management for both Moj and ShareChat.

Launched in 2018, HPF Films has worked on more than 3,500 titles across different formats ranging from digital advertisements to web series. It has also worked with brands such as Meesho, OKCredit, ixigo, and Ola among others.

“As ShareChat continues on the aggressive growth journey, it is important for us  to invest and build capabilities required to sustain growth on a large base. This acquisition will help us build a framework for our creators and nurture them to evolve as influencers on the platform. Moreover, HPF’s strength on creative side will also help us in creating innovative, high performing advertising solutions for the brands looking at engaging with our audiences,” said Manohar Charan, VP - Corporate Development and Strategic Finance, ShareChat.

ShareChat’s latest acquisition comes at a time when the Indian internet companies are aggressively pushing their services to capitalise the vacuum created following the TikTok ban. ShareChat, already an old player, has launched Moj, a TikTok-like short video sharing network. As of July, Moj had gone past 1 million downloads in India.

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Separately, ShareChat is also working to improve its technology for the vernacular audience. 

“ShareChat mostly sees content in the form of images and short videos. Thus, most  applications of AI at our company need an understanding of not just text but also visual and audio data. Interpreting the topic of any post on ShareChat in the same way as humans do by learning from all three modalities of data is highly interesting, especially  when it comes to subjective topics with subtle nuances in emotion etc. For instance, “Purani Yaadein” is a popular tag on ShareChat; we want AI models to discern whether a video has a reference to some sense of nostalgia in the text, audio or visuals in order to figure out whether it would be relevant for this tag,” said Debdoot Mukherjee, Vice President- AI, ShareChat in an interview with Hindustan Times.