VerSe Innovation, homegrown local language technology platform and parent company of DailyHunt and short-video platform Josh on Thursday announced that it has raised and signed definitive documents for over $450 million in a Series I funding round from marquee global investors Siguler Guff, Baillie Gifford, affiliates of Carlyle Asia Partners Growth II and others.

Existing investors Sofina Group, Qatar Investment Authority and BCap also participated north of their pro-rata in this round.

The fundraise comes just five months after securing $200 million. The company in February had raised over $100 million in a Series H funding round led by global investors Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar and Glade Brook Capital Partners.

Also rfead: VerSe Innovation raises over $100 mn from Google, Microsoft, others

Canaan Valley Capital and existing investor Sofina Group also participated in this round. This was along the heels of $100 million plus fundraise from Google, Microsoft and AlphaWave in December 2020.

This takes the total capital raise by the company in the first half of 2021 to beyond $650 million.

The latest fundraise has resulted in VerSe Innovation “more than doubling its valuation from its prior round 5 months ago,”it said without disclosing the exact amount.

VerSe was valued at over $1 billion in its Series H financing round.

“The investment will be focussed on strengthening the company’s leadership position as the largest, fastest growing local language AI driven content platform in the country,” the start-up said in an official release.

The company is planning to both, deepen and broaden its artificial intelligence/machine learning and data science capabilities to “further widen its leadership position across all user, engagement and retention metrics, drive further on monetisation including e-commerce and live streaming and further cement its market leadership across its local language creator base of over 50 million creators as well as its local language content ecosystem which experiences over 80 billion video plays per month,” it added.

VerSe Innovation’s proprietary technology powers homegrown short-video platform ‘Josh’ and local language content platform ‘Dailyhunt.’

Josh has over 115 million MAUs (Monthly Active Users) and more than 56 million DAUs (Daily Active Users).

Dailyhunt serves over 300 million users every month offering content artifacts every day in 14 languages from a licensed creator ecosystem of over 100,000 content partners and individual content creators, the company said.

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

Published on August 12, 2021