This former Facebook India head finds his sweet spot in vernacular content

Umang Bedi's firm VerSe capitalised on the ban on Chinese apps by launching 'Josh', which claims to have over 77 million monthly active users, 36 million daily users ad 1.5 billion video plays a day

Social networking giant Facebook might have been able to garner a huge user base in India, but the Menlo Park, California-headquartered firm, most industry observers agree, has not been able to monetise it to the extent it could have. That is said to be the reason behind the exits of two of Facebook India's previous heads, Kirthiga Reddy and later Umang Bedi. However, when Bedi, who left Facebook India in October 2017, took his next big bet, he clearly knew that what he was trying to do.

VerSe Innovation, the parent company of Dailyhunt, a local-language content platform he joined as a co-founder, had always given importance to how to make money even though the content aggregation space is capital-intensive. No doubt, in the just concluded financing round, the Bengaluru-based start-up not only attracted global technology majors such as Google and Microsoft as its investors, but also became the first Indian player in this space to achieve the coveted status of Unicorn, a term used to describe start-ups valued at more than $1 billion.

“We are generating revenue,” Bedi had told Business Standard in a September interview. “No venture capital wants to invest in businesses that only burn capital for zero revenue. It’s all about real world revenue and real world Ebitda, and most of the start-ups don’t even know how to spell these terms. We are driving profitable growth.”

On Tuesday, VerSe Innovation announced the closure of around $100 million in a funding round from existing investor Falcon Edge Capital and with participation by Google and Microsoft, valuing it over a $1 billion.

VerSe Innovation’s journey to become one of India’s most valued start-ups has not been that smooth. It originally started as a mobile value-added services (VAS) platform back in 2007 by Virendra Gupta, who had by then put more than a decade and a half working with various corporates, mostly in the telecom space. So it was an obvious choice for Gupta to pick up VAS, as India was at the cusp of a telecom-led revolutions with anticipated higher proliferation of mobile handsets and related content, and mobile SMS was still the second most used medium after the voice. But the real journey for the company started in 2017 when Gupta bought regional language news and content platform Newshunt in 2012, though it was still early days to think about consumption of vernacular content. But it was probably the most important and strategic bet that Gupta, an MBA from IIT-Bombay, took.

It was like shifting to a business-to-consumer (B2C) model after starting as a business-to-business (B2B) company, says Gupta. And the decision proved quite productive, with the proliferation of mobile devices powered by cheaper data doled out by the telecom services providers. Companies like Google and Facebook saw this as a huge opportunity and shoved their way through a series of initiatives, starting from offering Indic script keyboard, transliteration in vernacular language and so on. In 2015, the company rebranded Newshunt as Dailyhunt to provide support for several Indian languages including Assamese, Bhojpuri and Sindhi with personalised feed and refreshed user interface (UI).

The biggest boost however came when India decided to ban the Chinese apps, including the popular short video application TikTok earlier this year, following tension with the communist nation on the borders. VerSe seized the opportunity to launch ‘Josh’ which claims to have garnered over 77 million monthly active users, 36 million daily active users with around 1.5 billion video plays per day.

“We launched the app in beta phase two weeks after the China app ban, and the last 45 days in beta it has turned out to be the fastest growing app in the country. We are hoping to double in the next couple of months 100 million users,” says Bedi a featness freak who is said to have reduced quite a lot of weight after joining Newshunt.