New Delhi, Nov 12 (IANS): Indian social media platform ShareChat on Thursday said it has opened ShareChat Labs, a Centre of Excellence (CoE) in California's Palo Alto, its first establishment outside India.

The new set-up would be dedicated to build a technology backbone for the company aimed at bringing cutting-edge tech, ShareChat said, adding that it heavily emphasises on the Indian diaspora since it functions in various local languages.

With the new CoE, ShareChat would be able to give greater attention to innovation and building new-age solutions powered by Machine Learning (ML) to enhance user experience through advanced camera capabilities, deeper visual understanding of the images/videos and stronger content recommendation.

"As we set-up ShareChat Labs to develop groundbreaking technology solutions to accelerate our ambition of building the most sophisticated content creation and distribution engine, we believe the talent ecosystem available in the Sillicon Valley is going to play a major role," said Ankush Sachdeva, CEO and Co-founder, ShareChat, in a statement.

ShareChat also announced the appointment of former Product leader at Uber, Gaurav Mishra as senior Vice-President, Product, who spearheaded Artificial Intelligence (AI), data and marketplace platforms at Uber.

In his new role, Mishra will oversee the product development at multiple levels for ShareChat and its short-video platform 'Moj', and focus on growing a high-performing product team with expertise in consumer product and ML/AI.

ShareChat claims having more than 160 million users while its short-video platform 'Moj' has more than 80 million monthly active users.

The social media venture recently raised $40 million in its pre-series E-round from the likes of Twitter, SAIF Partners (now Elevation Capital), Lightspeed Ventures along with Indian corporate stalwarts like Hero MotoCorp CEO Pawan Munjal and DCM Shriram Promoters. Its overall funding stands at $264 million.