Mohalla Tech

Mohalla Tech protects 325 million Sharechat and Moj users with Cloudflare

ShareChat (Mohalla Tech) was among the first Indian social media developers to recognize a growing national demand for own-language content, especially for users outside major metropolitan centers. An applications developer with headquarters in Bangalore and an internationally distributed workforce of over 500 people, the company is responsible for two of India’s fastest-growing social media platform — ShareChat, a full-featured social network, and Moj, their short-form video content platform. At the vanguard of Indian social media, Mohalla harnesses AI and machine learning technologies to identify user interests and serve context-specific content, promoting engagement in the languages its users understand.

“India is a very diverse country,” explains Arya Ketan, Senior Principal Architect at ShareChat. “By creating applications that support content creation in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Odia, Bengali — 15 regional languages in total — we empower our users to share their culture, experience, and day-to-day journeys.”

Scaling and securing India’s largest regional social platforms

Fueled by widespread mobile phone adoption and the country’s steady progress toward universal Internet access, ShareChat and Moj experienced nearly exponential growth as users from India’s non-English-speaking population — a previously underserved market of nearly 500 million — embraced the platforms. Today, as India’s foremost regional social media platforms, ShareChat and Moj give voice to 1 million content creators and reach over 325 million users monthly — numbers that continue to grow as new users come online.

In the face of their rapidly increasing popularity, ShareChat faced mounting challenges. Topping that list was finding a way to efficiently secure, maintain, and continue developing their complex multi-language, API and AI-driven social media platforms as traffic and user numbers skyrocketed. To ensure a future of secure, scalable innovation for ShareChat and Moj, the company sought a solutions partner that could help them grow while:

• Securing millions of user interactions
• Protecting creators and original, user-generated content against scraping, plagiarism, and automated threats
• Delivering consistent performance and reducing latency across unpredictable global and regional network conditions
• Managing a complex API infrastructure across multiple app ecosystems

“Serving hundreds of millions of active users around the world, our growth and technical complexity reached unprecedented levels,” says Ketan. “We needed a comprehensive security and performance solution backed by a development partner with their core DNA in tech to help us make it all fit together and improve the quality of every interaction.”

Protecting users, content, and public-facing applications with Cloudflare

Intent on reducing complexity, improving internal efficiency, and enhancing experiences on ShareChat and Moj, the team explored several solutions before they decided upon Cloudflare. They were determined to maintain a lean security team, so access to extensive security and performance functionality and streamlined implementation were non-negotiable requirements.

“We wanted a platform with a very good, intuitive user interface and a single control plane for all of our performance and security applications,” says Ketan, “Cloudflare’s extensive product suite, aggressive innovation, and technical reputation was a natural fit.”

With the decision made, the company began addressing end-user safety, securing content, and protecting public-facing functionality with the Cloudflare application services portfolio. The company's initial security upgrades centered on implementing Cloudflare’s web application firewall to ensure the ShareChat and Moj applications could provide uninterrupted user experiences to millions.

“Our starting point was improving security and giving users safe, unhindered access to our platforms, but that was just the trigger,” says Ketan. “Now we use almost every application security feature Cloudflare offers.”

ShareChat cites usability as a major factor driving their decision to adopt Cloudflare. An uncluttered approach to product design and a consolidated control interface simplified onboarding and getting new users up to speed, while Cloudflare’s ease of use and low-friction implementation processes have helped ShareChat minimize administrative burdens and refocus technical resources on high-value business objectives.

“Cloudflare is so intuitive that even someone new to our security team can use it to create new rulesets and security configurations,” says Ketan. “That has had a huge impact on how we work and made it very easy for us to secure our platforms.”

Implementing Cloudflare has also enabled ShareChat to shift developer focus to product improvement rather than expending costly skilled resources on administering application security. With Cloudflare automating the protection of their web applications, ShareChat’s security teams reported a 70% drop in malicious traffic.

“Since we switched to Cloudflare, no threat has had any significant impact,” says Ketan. “Cloudflare improves our security posture without any need for regular intervention.”

Securing user content against scraping and other automated threats

User trust — securing and protecting creators content — is one of the foundations of ShareChat’s success. Using Cloudflare bot management and rate limiting, the company identifies and neutralizes unwanted bots and content scrapers on the network edge.

“There are a lot of talented creators generating valuable original content on ShareChat and Moj,” explains Ketan. “It is our responsibility to provide a safe environment for their uploads, and to ensure they don't lose their hard-earned views or have someone appropriate their memories. Cloudflare gives us that ability.”

Improving performance at home and abroad

With every delay affecting usability — particularly for Indian expatriates abroad seeking to reconnect to home and users in regions across India with unpredictable network conditions — ensuring frictionless uploads and low-latency interactions for content creators and their audiences makes the difference between a positive and negative user experience.

Using Argo Smart Routing — powered by the Cloudflare global network — ShareChat improves content loading reliability, and security. Argo Smart Routing detects network congestion around the world and dynamically re-routes ShareChat’s traffic Ketan estimates Argo reduces latency on ShareChat Moj and Moj by 40% speeding up the applications and ensuring content reaches end users as quickly as possible.

“With people coming to us from Europe and North America, Cloudflare helps us create optimized solutions that bridge those distances, improving application performance and eliminating latency for our users.” says Ketan.

Securing APIs and managing complexity with Gateway

Relying on API-driven functionality to power AI recommendations and multi-language functionality — the heart of the ShareChat and Moj platforms — one of the biggest benefits of ShareChat’s partnership with Cloudflare has been reducing complexity and gaining better visibility. Using Gateway the company has secured and simplified API security and management by consolidating everything on the Cloudflare edge.

"We had a lot of APIs but we lacked discoverability. We needed a way for our backend, frontend, and client teams to identify and safely work with our API resources," says Ketan. "Cloudflare helps us create that visibility while providing valuable telemetry about the user interactions happening on the platform."

Cloudflare’s API solutions offer real-time insights, schema validation, and anomaly detection, so ShareChat can identify unusual or malicious patterns before they can impact the user experience. Automated rules also allow the company to stop API threats, including zero-day exploits, authentication abuse, data loss, DDoS, and business logic attacks.

"Figuring out how users are going from one API to another helps our security team understand general usage and detect patterns that don’t conform to those sequences," says Ketan. “Overall, Cloudflare enables us to work with a much leaner team while maintaining enterprise-grade protection.”

Adopting an API-first mindset has also helped Mohalla improve internal efficiency.

"With Cloudflare providing visibility into the evolving nature of our APIs, we can control versioning and maintain smooth, controlled change rollouts," Ketan explains. "We’ve also started considering how to offload key security processes to Cloudflare to help us make faster decisions and improve security at the gate.”

Workers and Zero Trust for the future

Looking ahead, ShareChat is exploring the use of Cloudflare Workers to improve performance and bring AI inference closer to their end user. The company is also investigating how Cloudflare Zero Trust and cloud email security can help them improve internal security, particularly for their internationally based revenue and development teams. According to Ketan, ShareChat’s relationship with Cloudflare has evolved far beyond the typical vendor/client interaction.

“Some companies will always just be vendors, but others become partners focused on shared successes rather than individual wins. Cloudflare has proven to be an exceptional partner," says Ketan. "We are very thankful to have Cloudflare supporting us and enabling us with the technology we need to succeed.”