Dailyhunt parent VerSe Innovation raises $450M led by Siguler Guff, others

Bengaluru-based VerSe Innovation, which owns and operates Dailyhunt and Josh, today announced it has raised over $450 million in a Series I funding round led by global investors Siguler Guff, Baillie Gifford, affiliates of Carlyle Asia Partners Growth II.

The funding round was also participated by existing investors Sofina Group, Qatar Investment Authority, and BCap. Avendus Capital was the exclusive financial advisor to VerSe Innovation on the transaction. Following this, VerSe Innovation has doubled its valuation since Feb 2021 fundraise, the company said in a statement.

The round follows the closure of its Series H ($200 million) fundraise from Falcon Edge Capital via Alpha Wave Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, Google, Microsoft, and QIA. With this, the company has raised $550 million in funding this year. In December 2020, It had raised $100 million as part of its Series H round.

According to a statement, the raised capital will help the company to strengthen its leadership position in content space, deepening and broadening AI, machine learning, and data science capabilities. Additionally, It will also help in enhancing monetization capabilities on its platform through e-commerce and live streaming.

Founded by Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrashekhar Sohoni, VerSe Innovation operates news aggregator platform Dailyhunt and short video app Josh.

According to VerSe, Josh has over 115 million monthly active users (MAU), and more than 56 million daily active users. Whereas Dailyhunt currently serves over 300 million users every month offering content artifacts in 14 languages from a licensed creator ecosystem of over 100,000 content partners.

Dailyhunt currently supports 14 different languages, including English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Bhojpuri, Nepali, Bengali, Kannada, Punjabi, Urdu, Odia, and Malayalam.

Earlier in March this year, VerSe Innovation had acquired photo and video sharing platform Vebbler for an undisclosed sum.

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