Becomes India’s First Tech Unicorn For Local Languages
Bengaluru, NFAPost: VerSe Innovation announced it has completed over $100 million of funding from global marquee investors AlphaWave (a unit of Falcon Edge Capital), Google and Microsoft.
Existing investors Sofina Group and Lupa Systems 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, Goldman Sachs etc. 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.
The new funding comes at a time when VerSe Innovation is expanding its family of apps focused on Bharat, through its leading short video platform – Josh. VerSe Innovation is founded by Virendra Kumar Gupta and its other directors include Meghna Gupta and Umang Bedi along with five nomeinee directors.
Josh is made-in-Bharat-for-Bharat-by-Bharat-in 12-Bhartiya-languages-hosted-in-Bharat short video platform. Josh is the manifestation of VerSe Innovation’s commitment to Bharat across three big vectors.
First, VerSe plans to play a leading role in the Digital Bharat and Atmanirbhar Bharat initiatives. Second, VerSe plans to empower the large and indigenous ecosystem of hundreds of millions of users and talented creators in every nook and corner of our country. Third, VerSe aims to underline and promote the rich heritage and culture of India, aggregating such content and delivering it to the masses.
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.
Josh represents a confluence of India’s top 200+ best creators, the 10 biggest music labels, 15+ million UGC creators, best in class content creation tools, the hottest entertainment formats, and formidable user demographics. Josh has been consistently rated as the #1 Indian short-video app in India on the Play store.
Currently, Josh is the fastest growing and most engaged short-video app in India with over 77 million MAUs (Monthly Active Users), 36 million DAUs (Daily Active Users) and 1.5+ billion video plays per day.
VerSe Innovation’s proprietary technology platform also powers various technology solutions including 300 million + users on Dailyhunt to consume content in their local language. Dailyhunt is India’s #1 vernacular content platform offering content artifacts every day in 14 languages.
Content on Dailyhunt is sourced from a licensed creator ecosystem of over 100,000 content partners and individual content creators. This solid business foundation and capital infusion now set the Company on a path of rapid growth, as it explores other international geographies to extend its broad-based tech platforms in serving similar unmet content needs of local language audiences globally.
At the core of VerSe Innovation, is the idea that technology can help bridge the digital divide. Since its inception, VerSe has risen to the challenge of serving the unmet content needs of millions of consumers using technology. Its unique machine learning and deep learning technologies enables personalised content to be delivered to users based on their consumption preferences.
Today VerSe Innovation’s proprietary technology platform powers 300 million + users to consume content in their local language on Dailyhunt. Its technology also powers India’s #1 and most engaging short video app Josh.
