Dailyhunt, Josh parent VerSe Innovation raises over $450 million, valuation at $3 billion

In a key development, parent of local language news aggregators 'Dailyhunt', and short video platform 'Josh' VerSe Innovation has raised $450 in a new financing round. In this round, new investors like Siguler Guff, Baillie Gifford, affiliates of Carlyle Asia Partners Growth II, along with the old investors like others Sofina Group, Qatar Investment Authority, and BCap participated and brought up the company's valuation to nearly $3 billion, as per reports. 

The company claims to have doubled its valuation from its prior round. In the series H round, which concluded in February 2021, the Dailyhunt parent had raised more than $200 million from the likes of Falcon Edge Capital via Alpha Wave Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, Google, Microsoft, and QI Co-Founder of VerSe Innovations Umang Bedi while talking it to a leading portal said, “We never ran a formal process, it was just that there was strong inbound interest from investors. We were evaluating our needs for capital and this is the culmination of that process."

The company is aiming to strengthen its position as the fastest-growing local language Al-driven content platform in the country, and for the same is using all its funds to deepen and broaden its artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science capabilities.

Josh and DailyHunt

Reports suggest that VerSe Innovation’s proprietary technology platform serves one out of every two internet users in the country across ‘Josh’, a short video platform, and ‘Dailyhunt’, a local language content platform. 

Josh

Ever since the highly popular video-sharing app TikTok was banned, there had been a huge gap left in the market for a good video-sharing app. Many apps have emerged since then in the place of TikTok and Josh is the most prominent of them. The app at present has over 115+ million monthly active users, 56+ million daily active users, and the best DAU/MAU ratio in the industry of 49 per cent.

DailyHunt 

Dailyhunt is an Indian, News, and local language content application that serves over 300 million+ users every month offering content artefacts every day in 14 languages from a licensed creator ecosystem of over 100,000 content partners and individual content creators.

(Image Credits: @Officialjoshapp/@Dailyhuntapp/@vuru21-Twitter)