Dailyhunt parent VerSe becomes unicorn after funding from Google, Microsoft

Technology giants Google and Microsoft along with AlphaWave, a unit of Falcon Edge Capital, have invested over $100 million in vernacular content platform Dailyhunt parent VerSe Innovation, making it the first startup for local languages to hit the unicorn milestone.

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 new funding comes at a time when VerSe Innovation is expanding its family of apps through its leading short video platform Josh, which is available in 12 local languages. The company plans to deploy its new capital steadily in the continued scaling up of Josh.

At DailyHunt, former Facebook India head Umang Bedi along with co-founder Viru Gupta, are building a family of apps starting with Josh to make it the largest local languages platform in the country, aiming to be bigger than Facebook. The company wants to reach a billion users via its made in India apps by FY25. It is also exploring international geographies to extend its tech platforms in serving similar unmet content needs of local language audiences.

“This is the start of our family of apps which will be built on the common AI-ML learning local language tech stack that’s running the Dailyhunt app. We want to take away more than 2.5 hours everyday across our family of apps for the local language user,” Bedi earlier told Business Standard. Bedi joined DailyHunt in 2018, after taking Facebook’s user base to stellar heights in India.

Currently, Josh claims to have over 77 million monthly active users, 36 million daily active users and 1.5 billion video plays per day. Overall, Dailyhunt has 300 million users who consume content in their local language.