Saket Jha Saurabh, Director & Head - Content & AR Partnerships, Snap Inc

India is the largest market by user base for social networking major Snapchat with its GenZ population, and the app has about 250 million monthly active users in the country, a senior Snapchat executive said on Wednesday.

90 per cent of Snapchat’s audience in India is between 13 - 34 years in age, and a large part of our audience is Gen Z, which is a ‘visually expressive’ generation,” Saket Jha Saurabh, Director & Head - Content & AR Partnerships, Snap Inc, told businessline . “They don’t text much, they tend to think in visuals, there’s a lot of use of emojis, there’s a lot of use of AR, and a lot of use of video,” he explained. Similarly, India’s young Snapchat users also rely on creators a lot, he added, noting that they search for brands to shop or engage via creators.

Jha was in Chennai for the launch of its flagship Snapchat Creator Connect in Chennai that convened over 100 top local creators.

In India, the AR lenses feature (filters as they are often called) is also a big draw among the users, particularly the use of AR lenses around cultural moments such as festivals, movie releases, and major sporting events, Jha said.

Speaking of what sets Snapchat apart in a sector seeing strong war for GenZ attention, He noted that Snapchat has always thought of itself as a camera company, driving cutting-edge visual messaging technologies.

Interestingly, Snapchat’s sixth-generation Spectacles, a rival to Meta’s Ray Ban, is set to be launched for consumers in 2026. While the markets of launch were not disclosed, Jha said they will also be “hopefully in India soon.” “We believe as a company that the future of consumption online doesn’t have to necessarily be only through the smartphone...And specs fits beautifully in that,” he said.

Refusing to directly comment to a query on the Telecom Department’s directives to messaging platform on Sim binding, Jha said that Snapchat is deeply invested on the “underlying idea” of the directive of safety and security of its platform.

Given Snap’s deep relationship with young Indians, they also see more brands -from conglomerates to new-age firms- coming on to the platform. “What we have seen [growth in brands] in the last 18 to 24 months is very exciting. Today, we have advertisers from all categories,” Jha said.

The company is also bullish about the growth of the creator economy in India and users’ perception of creators. “There has been a shift in how consumers react to personal communication from individuals as compared to brands,” he said. The other factor driving creators is the ease of content creation with AI, AR and others, he added.

In India, the Snap team also works to bring new AR developers on to the platform by engaging with colleges and other institutions. “The AR developer ecosystem in India is one of the largest for Snapchat worldwide and growing rapidly,” said Jha.

Published on December 3, 2025