Dailyhunt’s parent company VerSe Innovation on Tuesday announced that it has completed its latest funding round, raising over $100 million from global marquee investors including AlphaWave (a unit of Falcon Edge Capital), Google and Microsoft.
Existing investors Sofina Group and Lupa Systems had also participated in this round. Other existing blue-chip investors of VerSe Innovation include the likes of Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital India, Falcon Edge Capital, and Goldman Sachs, among others.
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“With this new infusion of capital, the company is now valued at over $1 billion, making its debut as the first unicorn in tech for local languages,” VerSe said.
The tech company will leverage this new capital to scale up its ‘Made in India’ short video platform Josh. The company had launched the platform earlier this year “to fill the void” left by the TikTok ban. The app was launched in 12 local languages.
“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,” it said.
Josh currently has over 7.7 crore monthly active users (MAUs) and 3.6 crore daily active users (DAUs), VerSe said. The Bengaluru-based start-up also has over 30 crore users on Dailyhunt, its vernacular news content platform spanning over 14 languages.