Dailyhunt parent VerSe Innovation raises $100 million in fresh funds from Google, Microsoft and others

Technology giants Google and Microsoft along with AlphaWave, a unit of Falcon Edge Capital, have invested over $100 million (around Rs 738 crore) in content platform Dailyhunt parent VerSe Innovation Private Limited, taking its valuation over $1 billion and into the unicorn club. Existing investors Sofina Group and Lupa Systems also participated in the round. Other investors of VerSe Innovation include Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital India, Falcon Edge Capital and Goldman Sachs.

The company plans to use the new capital to scale up its short-form video app Josh, expand its local language content offerings, to develop a content creator ecosystem and leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in it. Josh is currently available in 12 Indian languages.

Josh was founded in September after the ban of Tiktok and other apps in India. According to Google Play store, the short-form video making app has been downloaded over 50 million times.

In September 2014, the company had secured funds of over Rs 100 crore from Sequoia Capital India. In September 2019, Dailyhunt had raised Rs 24.61 crore from Omidyar and Sequoia Capital India.

Founded in 2009 as Newshunt, the Bengaluru-based content startup rebranded as DailyHunt in 2015. It aggregates content from newspapers and websites in multiple Indian regional languages, including Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil and Bhojpuri.