VerSe Innovation Private Ltd., Dailyhunt’s parent company, has received more than $100 million (around Rs 738 crore) funding from Falcon Edge Capital’s AlphaWave, Google and Microsoft at a valuation of more than $1 billion. Private investment firms Sofina Group and Lupa Systems were the existing investors that participated in the latest funding round.
With this round, VerSe Innovation becomes the country’s first unicorn in tech focused on local languages. The company plans to utilise the fresh capital to scale up its short videos app Josh, expand its local languages content offering for developing its creator ecosystem and to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
The Bengaluru-based company has launched Josh in September after the Government of India banned Bytedance’s short form videos app TikTok in June, to capture the short-video space. TikTok’s ban led millions of users to shift towards Indian short form video apps including Chingari, Moj, Mitron and Roposo. Josh app supports 12 India languages and is one of the most downloaded Indian short-video apps on Google Play Store. The app has over 77 million monthly active users (MAU), more than 36 million daily active users and over 1.5 billion video played every day.
The latest round is the biggest funding round of VerSe Innovation. Earlier, the company has raised over Rs 100 crore from Sequoia Capital India in 2014. The company’s local language news and video app Dailyhunt had secured Rs 24.61 crore from Omidyar and Sequoia Capital India in September 2019.