VerSe Innovation, the parent firm of popular news and entertainment app Dailyhunt and short video app Josh, said on Monday the Indian startup has raised over $100 million as part of its Series H financing round from Qatar Investment Authority and Glade Brook Capital Partners.
The announcement follows another $100 million+ investment the startup secured from Google, AlphaWave, and Microsoft in December last year. The investment then had made Dailyhunt a unicorn (giving it a valuation of $1 billion or higher).
Dailyhunt is a popular news and entertainment app that serves more than 285 million users each day in 14 local languages. Its reach in India would explain why Twitter last month partnered with the startup to bring Moments to Dailyhunt.
VerSe Innovation expanded to short form videos last year, with Josh. after New Delhi banned TikTok and created a void for snacking content in the country. The startup says Josh has amassed over 85 million monthly active users and the app sees more than 1.5 billion video plays each day.
“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 leading Indian short-video app in India on the Play store,” the startup said in a statement.
The startup said it will deploy the fresh capital to broaden its content offering local languages, and expand its creators ecosystem and AI and ML stacks.
This is a developing story. More to follow…
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