VerSe Innovation Enters Unicorn Club After Raising Over $100 Mn From Google, Microsoft and Others The fresh funds raised will be utilized for scaling its short-video platform, Josh
By Debarghya Sil •
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As we slowly approach towards the end of this year, Indian startup ecosystem which is considered to have lent a hand in the revival of this country's economy and expedited India's digitization on Tuesday has got another Unicorn.
Bangalore-based VerSe Innovation, the parent company of popular news aggregator platform Daily Hunt, has received more than $100 million in funding from Google, Microsoft and Falcon Edge's Alpha Wave Incubation. Existing investors Sofina Group and Lupa Systems Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital India and others.
The latest funding has helped the firm to reach a valuation of more than $1 billion thus allowing it to enter the coveted club of Unicorns. This is the tenth startup that has turned into Unicorn in this pandemic-hit year.
The latest funding has come at a time when VerSe Innovation is expanding its family of apps focused on Bharat, through its leading short video platform Josh.
Josh is a made-in-Bharat-for-Bharat-by-Bharat-in 12-Bhartiya-languages-hosted-in-Bharat short-video platform.
"VerSe plans to deploy its new capital steadily in the continued scaling up of Josh, the augmentation of local language content offerings, the development of content creator ecosystem, innovation in AI and ML and the growth of its truly made-in-Bharat-for-Bharat short-video platform," as per the company's statement.
Josh boasts of having more than 200 best influencers in the country, around 10 biggest music labels and around 15 million UGC creators. Currently, Josh has over 77 million MAUs (monthly active users), 36 million DAUs (daily active users) and 1.5 billion-plus video plays per day.
Apart from Josh, the company also powers Dailyhunt which has a user base of more than 300 million. Dailyhunt allows users to consume news in 14 languages. Content on Dailyhunt is sourced from a licensed creator ecosystem of over 100,000 content partners and individual content creators.
