Josh, a short video app that was formally launched on Wednesday by Dailyhunt, an Indian local language content discovery platform, is set to fill the space that fell vacant following the Centre’s ban on Chinese app TikTok. Thanks to the pandemic and the ban, the Indian app developer community seem to be proving its prowess.

Virendra Gupta and Umang Bedi, co-founders of Dailyhunt, said: “The numbers have exploded; more than 200 top creators have moved exclusively to Josh. And we are just getting started.”

‘Made in Bharat’

Bedi said: “The heart of our success lies in the tech platform that we have built. Josh is a mega confluence of creators and music labels; the app has been devised intuitively, driven by AI, and is the outcome of deep machine learning. It is a Made-in-Bharat, for-Bharat and by-Bharat app in 10 Indian languages.”

Echoing Bedi’s Bharat sentiment, Gupta said: “70 per cent of Indians still prefer to converse in their local language, not English. We decided to capitalise on this by building a platform for Bharat.”

Josh users can enjoy short videos thar are up to 120 seconds long. Gupta said that by collaborating with music labels such as T-Series, Sony, Zee Music and Divo Music, Josh would help “unravel the power of music to the madness of creativity.”

“We will be rolling out a few more apps in the next 3 -4 weeks,” the founder said, adding that “our vision is to serve one billion Indians and get a hundred-thousand top talents on this platform.”

Bedi said: “Dailyhunt’s user base has grown seven times in the last two years; the time spent by daily active users is up 30 per cent. We have built our own ad-tech platform. We monetise with advertising; this has registered exponential growth — the annual recurring revenue (ARR) in FY20 was over $120 million. We hope to achieve $250 million in FY21.”

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