[Funding] Dailyhunt becomes 11th Unicorn in 2020 after investment from Google, Microsoft

VerSe Innovation that owns Dailyhunt on Tuesday said that it has raised over $100 million in funding from Google, Microsoft and Alphawave. The investment values the company at more than $1 billion, making it the “first unicorn in tech for local languages”. Existing investors Sofina Group and Lupa Systems also participated in the financial round.

DailyHunt is co-run by Umang Bedi, former Facebook India head. The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital to scale the Josh app. Josh is the company’s short video platform launched during the TikTok ban to fill the short video content void. The firm claims that Josh has already reached a monthly active user base of over 77 million. It also has nearly 36 million daily active users. The video app offers content in 12 local languages sees about 1.5 billion video plays every day. With this fund, Dailyhunt aims to augment local language content offerings and develop a content creator ecosystem. It will also focus on innovation in AI and ML to grow the short-video platform.

From Google

In a separate blog post, Google said the investment underlines its strong belief in partnering with India’s innovative startups and commitment to working towards the shared goal of building an inclusive digital economy that will benefit everyone. The internet behemoth is also working to support the wider ecosystem in India, particularly local startups innovating in this space.

Talking about both investments, in Glance and VerSe, Caesar Sengupta, Vice President, Google said,

"We’re pleased to announce investments in leading Indian startups Glance InMobi and VerSe Innovation. The fund will enable them to further scale the availability of relevant and engage content in different formats across various Indic languages.

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When we shared details of the India Digitization Fund in July this year, we identified enabling affordable access and information for every Indian in their own language, whether it’s Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, and more as a key pillar in order to drive forward India’s digitization."

With this investment, Dailyhunt parent company VerSe joins the list to become the 11th Unicorn in 2020. The list includes major names like Razorpay, Firstcry, Cars24 etc, and the latest one, Glance.