VerSe Innovation raises $450 mn in Series I funding from global investors

VerSe Innovation's proprietary technology platform serves one out of every two internet users in the country

VerSe Innovations, the parent company of short video platform Josh and digital media platform DailyHunt, raised over $450 million in a series I round of funding from investors Siguler Guff, Baillie Gifford, affiliates of Carlyle Asia Partners Growth II and others. Existing investors Sofina Group, Qatar Investment Authority and BCap also participated north of their pro-rata in this round.

This fund raised comes within five months of the company’s last raise of $200 million from investors Falcon Edge Capital via Alpha Wave Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, Google, Microsoft and QIA.

With the current raise the company’s valuation is close to $3 billion. According to the company they have doubled its valuation from its prior round. In the series H round the company was valued at over $1 billion.

“We never ran a formal process, it was just that there was a strong inbound interest from investors. Even the last finding we did was oversubscribed. We were evaluating our needs for capital and this is the culmination of that process,” said Umang Bedi, co-founder, VerSe Innovations.

The investment will be focused on strengthening the company’s position as the fastest growing local language AI driven content platform in the country. VerSe plans on both deepen and broaden its AI/ML and data science capabilities to further widen its position across all user, engagement & retention metrics, drive further on monetization including e-Commerce & Live streaming and further cement its clear market leadership across its local language creator base of over 50 million creators as well as its local language content ecosystem which experiences over 80 billion video plays per month.

“There are only two things that differentiate short-video platforms as leaders or laggards; first its capabilities in AI/ML and depth of content and ecosystem. We have been acquiring companies and one of them was Cognirel Technologies that brought to us Ram Prakash, who is one of the best minds in AI in India. He and his team have been driving the retention rates at the company and it is 40-50 per cent higher than competition. We are going deep into the next phase of AI/ML by acquiring companies and setting up labs across the globe and hiring global talent, which will give us a competitive edge,” said Virendra Gupta, co-founder VerSe Innovations.

With these investments the company is now looking to set up global labs across the globe with PhDs and mathematicians who can help solve video encoding problems, or all other issues that are related to faster uploading of videos.

When asked about competition, Bedi added: “When you look at the core growth on DailyHunt, we have crossed $150 million in terms of monetization, scaling to over $200 million by the end of this year, we are the only platform in our segment that is making money. On video and short form video, professionally generated content we have 50 million creators and these are original content."

Over the next 12 months the company will be focused on growing into the Indian market and post that will tap into international markets like South East Asia.

Josh, shared Bedi, is the fastest growing and most engaged short-video app in India with over 115 million MAUs (Monthly Active Users), over 56 million DAUs (Daily Active Users) and the best DAU/MAU ratio in the industry of 49 per cent. Josh represents a confluence of India’s top 200 best creators, the 15 biggest music labels, content creation tools, and diverse set of entertainment formats.

Dailyhunt, serves over 300 million users every month offering content artifacts every day in 14 languages from a licensed creator ecosystem of over 100,000 content partners and individual content creators. “At DailyHunt we have noticed that internet users who are coming online are coming through the local language audience. That is growing and we want to grow it further. We will be focused on generating content from the widest and farthest nook of the country. A big focus on hyperlocal, focus on small businesses and making advancement in ad tech and shop in shop kind of advertisement. Lot of innovation in core business,” added Bedi.