Verse Innovation, which owns and operates brief video app Josh and content aggregator app Dailyhunt, has secured more than $one hundred million in funding from Falcon Edge Capital’s AlphaWave, Google, and Microsoft at a valuation of more than $1 billion. The most up-to-date to join the unicorn tally in India, Dailyhunt’s current investors Sofina Group and Lupa Systems also participated in the present round. The investment will be routed to the company’s brief video app Josh that competes with MX TakaTak, Roposo, Moj Mitron, Trell, and Chingari and at present banned TikTok. The app is at present accessible in 12 Indian languages.
Apart from investing in Josh, the funding will be deployed towards the augmentation of neighborhood language content offerings, the improvement of content creator ecosystem, and innovation in AI and ML, the enterprise mentioned announcing the investment in a statement on Tuesday. The app at present has more than 200 creators, 10 music labels, more than 15 million user generated content (UGC) creators, and so forth. with more than 77 million month-to-month active customers and 36 million day-to-day active customers, the enterprise mentioned. The app ‘plays’ more than 1.5 billion videos per day.
Josh has been amongst a bunch of homegrown apps that benefitted from the TikTok ban in June this year, making a void in the marketplace for brief-type content creators and viewers. The brief-type content apps saw a decline in month-to-month time spent by customers to just 37 billion minutes in July 2020. However, it has bottomed out considering the fact that then and has scaled back to 95 billion minutes till early December, according to a current RedSeer report. TikTok had a share of 85-90 per cent of total month-to-month time spent by Indians on brief-type apps in June 2020 but lost about 40 per cent share to Indian apps in October 2020. As a outcome, from 4-6 per cent share of about 165 billion minutes (275 hours) spent by viewers on Indian brief-type apps in June 2020, such as Josh by Dailyhunt, MX TakaTak, Roposo, Moj Mitron, Trell, and Chingari, enhanced to about 67 per cent, roughly translating to 55 billion minutes (91 hours), in October.
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The penetration of brief-type content in India is at present about 45 per cent of around 600 million world-wide-web customers in India — about 275 million customers who access brief-type content on the back of shorter focus spans of millennials and GenZ, enhanced visibility for creators, require for entertainment, and vast vernacular libraries, according to Redseer. The user base is anticipated to develop to 580 million customers and about 430 million MAUs by FY25.