New investors such as Ontario Teachers Pension Fund, Luxor Capital and Sumeru Ventures and its existing backers such as Sofina Group, Bailey Gifford and others have also participated in the round.
The Bengaluru-based firm said the latest fundraising would raise its valuation to $5 billion after investments.
CPPIB has invested $425 million, contributing nearly half of the total capital raised by the company, which started life with the Newshunt portal in 2007.
VerSe Innovations was valued at around $3 billion in August last year after $450 million in funding and before investments by Google and Microsoft. The company has raised $1.5 billion in the past year, underscoring the capital-intensive nature of the industry.
While Dailyhunt’s core business of Versace generated $127 million in revenue in fiscal 2012, the highly competitive and cash-consuming short-video segment gained a significant following in February with the merger of ShareChat’s Moz and Times Internet’s MXTalkTalk. saw the consolidation. These players came to prominence in 2020 after India banned several Chinese apps, including the popular short-video app TikTok, owned by Bytedance. Moj, MX TakaTak, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are among the apps that compete with Josh. Times Internet is part of The Times of India Group which publishes The Economic Times.
Find stories that interest you
The company said Josh has 150 million monthly active users, of which 49% are daily active users. Dailyhunt serves more than 350 million users every month, it says.
In addition to Dailyhunt and Josh, Versace Innovations also owns PublicVibe, a hyper-local video platform.
Cofounder Virendra Gupta and former Facebook India managing director Umang Bedi, who have also been named as cofounders at the Bengaluru company, told ET in an interaction that they will continue to invest in the short-video business and will continue to invest through various models. Will leave commerce behind.
“This is the largest investment by CPPIB in an Indian startup and what makes it interesting is the time when companies in India and globally are finding it difficult to raise money and are getting down rounds,” Bedi said.
Where will the fund go?
Gupta and Bedi said they will deploy parts of the new capital to “deepen and broaden” their artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science capabilities for better user engagement, retention and monetization.
Verse is also looking to offer a Web3.0 experience across languages on its platform, apart from trying out social commerce, live commerce and impact-led commerce. It plans to partner with leading e-commerce companies and move forward with the creator community.
Bedi said they are also aiming to create a monetization model for short videos. “It includes a purchasable commerce experience, influencer commerce, live commerce and a new Web3.0 platform experience for influencers, which is not only here but we will be happy to take it global,” he added.
The company is expected to formally announce its entry into commerce in the coming weeks. “The user experience should be good. When we do things, it has to go beyond announcing a pilot. This is why new avenues of monetization – through impact-led commerce – are being built in a very integrated way of short videos,” Gupta said.
No comments:
Post a Comment