The google-backed parent company of Dailyhunt and Josh raises over $ 100 million
Verse Innovation, the parent company of popular news and entertainment app Dailyhunt and short video app Josh, announced on Monday that it had funded a Series H Authority and Glade Brook Capital Partners raised over $ 100 million from Qatar Investment
The announcement follows another investment of over $ 100 million that the startup secured from Google, AlphaWave, and Microsoft last December. That investment tranche, also part of Series H, had made Dailyhunt a unicorn (valuation of $ 1 billion or more). The startup has raised around $ 430 million to date.
Dailyhunt, jointly operated by Virendra Gupta and former Facebook India boss Umang Bedi, is a popular news and entertainment app, each serving more than 285 million users Day in 14 national languages in India. Its reach in India, the second-largest internet market in the world, would explain why Twitter partnered with India last month to bring Moments to Dailyhunt.
Verse Innovation expanded to short videos with Josh last year after New Delhi TikTok banned and created a theoretical void for snacking content in the country. Numerous big giants and startups – including MX Player and ShareChat – have tried their hand at short videos over the past few quarters.
Facebook launched Instagram Reels in India last year, and YouTube launched Shorts, which is already over 3.5 in India Billions of hits received every day. (With over 450 million users in India, YouTube is closing in on the WhatsApp market leader in India.)
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Josh seems to have emerged as one of the leading players: The startup says Josh has amassed more than 85 million monthly active users, 40 million of whom check the app every day, and the app sees more than 1.5 thousand millions video views every day
Now the startup says it is exploring expansion into more categories and, as with Dailyhunt and Josh, serving users in smaller cities and towns and eventually replicating this model. India’s internet economy is expected to be worth $ 639 billion by 2030, Citi analysts wrote in a report to clients late last month. The coronavirus pandemic accelerated digital adoption and user appetite for transactions. online, a UBS analyst report said last week
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“Josh represents the influence of the 200 best creators in India, the top 10 music labels, more than 15 million UGC creators, the best content creation tools in their class, the most popular entertainment formats. popular and a formidable user demographic. Josh has consistently been rated as the Indian short video leader in India on the Play Store, ”the startup said in a statement.
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The startup said it will deploy fresh capital to expand its local language content offering and expand its creator’s ecosystem and AI and ML technology stacks.
Techcrunch / TechConflict.Com