Microsoft, Google backing pushes India’s Dailyhunt into unicorn territory

VerSe Innovation, the parent company of news aggregator Dailyhunt, announced it has completed a funding round worth over a US$100 million from AlphaWave, Google, and Microsoft, marking its entry into India’s unicorn club.

Existing investors Sofina Group and Lupa Systems also participated in the financing round.

Virendra Gupta, founder and CEO of Dailyhunt / Photo credit: Dailyhunt

The latest fundraise sets the company on track for expansion into international geographies and for targeting local language audiences globally. It also plans on deploying its new capital to develop its short-video platform Josh, its local language content offerings, and its content creator ecosystem, as well as double down on its artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Josh, which is available on the Google Play Store, claims to engage over 77 million monthly active users and 36 million daily active users, and to have more than 1.5 billion video plays per day.

The short-video app was launched in July, shortly after India had blacklisted several Chinese apps, including ByteDance’s TikTok, and made room for the rollout of new entertainment applications based out of India.

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The investment also comes amid plans of Dailyhunt’s operational restructuring after the Indian government had announced capping foreign investment in digital media firms at 26%, a policy that will be in effect in October 2021.