Founders of social media platform ShareChat — hailing from Lucknow, Gorakhpur and Ghaziabad — have made it to the Forbes 30 under 30 Asia 2018 list. The list features young disruptors, innovators and entrepreneurs across Asia, all under the age of 30.

The Forbes website reads: “Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Ankush Sachdeva met as students, and in 2015 they created ShareChat, an online local language-based social media platform.”

All three are alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K).

Farid Ahsan, 25, of Lucknow, Bhanu Pratap Singh, 26, of Gorakhpur and Ankush Sachdeva, 24, of Ghaziabad developed the vernacular social networking application ShareChat as a technology led start-up based out of Bangalore.

According to information mentioned on the Forbes website, the youngsters’ aim was to share the social media experience with speakers of South Asian languages, Hindi and Punjabi, allowing them to make profile, upload content and establish followers.

“Their app is used by eight million users monthly. Currently, they have raised $23.6 million from investors such as SAIF Partners and Xiaomi,” reads the website.

Speaking on how their platform was designed to cater to the needs of the Indian internet users, Farid said, “ShareChat is changing the way in which the next set of billion Indian users consume the internet through their multi-lingual user-generated content platform and cutting-edge technology infrastructure. It is the first social network that gathers geo-specific data on Indian content on a large scale and leverages a highly data-oriented approach to cater to the diverse needs of the Indian internet users.”

Bhanu added, “ShareChat app can be downloaded from the Google Play Store and used in various regional languages. It allows users to create posts, follow people, consume multimedia content, interact with other people through comments and share things with various other communication platforms in an easy way.”

Calling the application intuitive and convenient, Ankush said, “ShareChat aims to optimise social media content for Indian users and become a unique problem solver for the mass vernacular audience in the country.”

Backed by strategic investors, ShareChat has an established user base of almost 30 million users spread across the country and provides the platform in 14 languages including Hindi, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Odia, Kannada, Assamese, Haryanvi, Rajasthani and Bhojpuri.