How vernacular platform Dailyhunt plans to take on Facebook in Bharat

The vernacular platform's parent VerSe has become a unicorn after over $100 mn funding from Google, Microsoft and others

Local language content and news aggregator platform Dailyhunt is ending 2020 on a high. Flush with over $100 million in funding from technology giants Google and Microsoft along with AlphaWave, a unit of Falcon Edge Capital, its parent VerSe Innovation has become the latest unicorn coming out of India and the first in the local language space.

It is learnt that AlphaWave led the round pumping in $50 million followed by Google's around $30 million and Microsoft's $10 million with some commercial arrangement. Sequoia Capital which is an existing investor did not participate in the round.

Launched with the goal to develop a media platform for local language users, Dailyhunt has started to build a family of apps for Bharat. “We want to own the time share, the mind share and the revenue share of all local language audiences in the country,” said Umang Bedi, former Facebook India head and co-founder of Dailyhunt. 

His and Viru Gupta’s (the other co-founder) aim is to build the country’s largest local language platform, even bigger than Facebook. Gupta says, Bedi’s coming on board has given them the courage to take over the global social media giant in the country.

One of the first offerings by the company in its journey to create a family of local language apps is Josh, a short video platform which was launched in beta phase two weeks after the TikTok ban in India. The new capital will be used for the scaling up of Josh. 

According to Google, data shows that rural consumption now accounts for roughly 45 per cent of overall mobile data usage in the country, and is primarily focused on online video. But many of these internet users continue to have trouble finding content to read or services they can use confidently, in their own language. And this limits the value of the internet for them, particularly at a time like this when the internet is the lifeline of so many people.  

“This investment underlines our strong belief in partnering deeply with India’s innovative startups, and our commitment to working towards the shared goal of building a truly inclusive digital economy that will benefit everyone,” said Caesar Sengupta, VP, Google, in a blogpost on Tuesday.

Bengaluru-based Dailyhunt had been looking at unique use cases that it could in terms of content consumption in vernacular languages and one of them that it was working on for a while was short videos. But the catalyst to roll out Josh was the ban on Chinese apps, which the company saw as a huge market opportunity. Today, about 70 per cent of content creators on Josh comine from tier-II and tier-III cities. 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. In the long-run, the company wants to reach a billion users via its made in India apps by FY25.

Co-founder Gupta says launching an app is like building a dam. “If the foundation is not right, you cannot innovate on that. We can launch a family of apps tomorrow, but we want to refine things to launch in a good and successful way,” he said. 

“Viru and Umang’s passion for serving Bharat with their tech and data led DNA, empowering millions of local language creators and has helped them reach unprecedented scale and dominant leadership,” said Neeraj Shrimali, director, Digital and Technology Investment Banking, Avendus Capital, which was the advisor to VerSe Innovation on the transaction.