Bengaluru based VerSe Innovation, the parent company of regional language news aggregator Dailyhunt, has received more than $100 million in funding from tech giants Google, Microsoft, and Falcon Edge's Alpha Wave Incubation enabling it to enter the Unicorn Club. A statement from Company says it has crossed the $1 billion valuation mark. Sofina Group and Lupa Systems, the existing investors have also participated in the fund raising round.
VerSe Innovation plans to use the fresh funds to scale up the short video app Josh, called as Indian TikTok version, develop its content creator ecosystem, and enhance its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. Josh now has more than 77 million monthly active users and 1.5 billion video plays daily. Dailyhunt is reportedly restructuring its operations so as to diversify into news of multiple categories, which mulls the investment talks. The investments talks arouse by the government's move that requires digital media entities to cap foreign investment at 26% by October 2021.
A month ago, the company had also raised around $10 million from B Capital. Dailyhunt was founded in 2009 as Newshunt and rebranded as Dailyhunt in 2015. The application aggregates 14 Indian languages including Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Bhojpuri, etc. contents from newspapers/websites. Dailyhunt claims it has more than 300 million users across its apps and a network of over 100,000 content partners and individual content creators. Matrix Partners India and Goldman Sachs are also among its investors.
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