Dailyhunt is now a unicorn, receives $100 million funding
VerSe Innovation, the parent company of local language news aggregator Dailyhunt, has received more than $100 million in funding from tech giants Google, Microsoft, and Falcon Edge's Alpha Wave Incubation According to the company, it has crossed the $1 billion valuation mark. Existing investors Sofina Group and Lupa Systems have also participated in the round. Here are more details.
The company plans to use the fresh funds to scale up its short video app Josh, develop its content creator ecosystem, and enhance its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. Josh was launched soon after the ban on TikTok by the Indian government in June. The platform now claims to have more than 77 million monthly active users and 1.5 billion video plays daily.
The new investment round comes even as Dailyhunt is reportedly restructuring its operations so as to diversify into multiple categories. This has been done in wake of the government's move that requires digital media entities to cap foreign investment at 26% by October 2021. The company had also raised around $10 million from B Capital a month ago.
Founded in 2009 as Newshunt, the Bengaluru-based content start-up was rebranded as Dailyhunt in 2015. It aggregates content from newspapers/websites in 14 Indian languages including Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Bhojpuri, etc. It claims to have over 300 million users across its apps and a network of over 100,000 content partners and individual content creators. Matrix Partners India and Goldman Sachs are also among its investors.
