Local language tech platform VerSe Innovation's valuation crosses $5 bn

VerSe Innovation, India’s biggest local language technology platform, said it has raised and signed definitive documents for $805 million in the latest funding rounds from marquee global investors which will raise the firm’s valuation to $5 billion.

Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’), Luxor Capital, Sumeru Ventures and others participated in the round, and CPP Investments led the round with $425 million investment. Existing investors Sofina Group, Baillie Gifford and others will also participate north of their pro-rata in this round.

The firm was earlier valued at $3 billion. VerSe Innovations is the parent company of short video platform Josh and digital media platform DailyHunt.

The investment will be focused on strengthening the company’s leadership position in the country. VerSe plans to both deepen and broaden its AI and ML (machine learning) and data science capabilities.

This would further help cement its leadership position across all user, engagement and retention metrics, drive deeper monetisation including influencers, e-commerce and live streaming and foray into Web 3.0 experiences. This is across its local language creator base of over 50 million as well as its local language content ecosystem, which experiences over 80 billion video plays per month. 

“This partnership will strengthen our ability and leadership to deliver on our vision to build the largest AI-powered local language content platform across a family of apps serving the next billion users,” said Virendra Gupta, founder, VerSe Innovation, and Umang Bedi, co-founder.

“With a strategic focus on video content and building for India, we have seen explosive growth emerging from the next billion users coming out of regional India. This investment comes at a time when we’re on a path to further expand our offerings, monetization models, deliver superlative Web 3.0 experiences for the globe and create an IPO scale business.”

This follows close on the heels of a $650 million round.

“India’s digital content is experiencing phenomenal growth, and VerSe Innovation is well-positioned to be one of the leaders in the fast-growing short video and local language content space,” said Frank Su, managing director, Head of Private Equity Asia, CPP Investments.

Avendus Capital was the exclusive financial advisor to VerSe Innovation on the transaction.

VerSe Innovation’s proprietary technology platform serves one out of every two internet users in the country across Josh and Dailyhunt, coupled with PublicVibe, the fastest-growing hyper-local video platform.

The firm said Josh has over 150 million MAUs (monthly active users), the best DAU/MAU ratio in the industry of 49 per cent and the highest retention. Dailyhunt serves over 350 million users every month offering content artefacts every day in 15 languages. PublicVibe serves over 5 million MAUs and 1 million daily active users (DAUs) and has over 6 million downloads on Play Store.

“We are pleased to make a significant investment in VerSe Innovation through our new Alternative Capital Solutions team, which offers flexible capital to high-quality public and private growth companies,” said Maggie Fanari, managing director and global group head, High Conviction Equities at Ontario Teachers.

Gupta of VerSe Innovation said in India 70 per cent of people doesn’t speak English, and that’s the largest and fastest-growing market. This is the middle of Bharat, which is the biggest problem to crack in terms of engagement and monetisation. “What VerSe Innovation has been able to do is crack the code of engagement and monetization of this middle of Bharat user base,” said Gupta.