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Bengaluru-based VerSe Innovation, the guardian firm of an Indian TikTok spinoff referred to as Josh, has raised greater than $100 million (roughly Rs. 740 crores) from traders together with Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft, months after the Chinese-owned short-video app was banned in India.
Josh is one in all a number of home-grown short-video platforms which have sprung up since India blocked the wildly in style TikTok in June amidst a border disaster with China, attracting world investor curiosity in purposes filling the hole. Bengaluru-based VerSe Innovation, which owns Josh, is valued at greater than $1 billion (roughly Rs. 7,400) following the funding, it stated in an announcement. Josh has crossed 50 million downloads on the Google Play retailer.
AlphaWave, part of world asset supervisor Falcon Edge Capital, additionally invested in VerSe, as did present traders Sofina Group and Lupa Systems, VerSe stated, including that it might use the funds to scale up Josh. VerSe additionally owns information and content material platform Dailyhunt, which presents content material in a number of Indian languages.
Google stated the funding is a part of its $10 billion (roughly Rs. 73,900 crores) Google for India Digitization Fund created to speed up India’s digital economic system.
“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 digitisation,” Google stated in a weblog submit.
Google stated that it had additionally invested in Glance InMobi, which runs lock-screen content material app Glance and short-video app Roposo, other than VerSe.
In September, Indian content-sharing platform ShareChat raised $40 million (roughly Rs. 300 crores) from traders together with Twitter Inc and Lightspeed Ventures, in an effort to drive development for its new short-video app Moj. The app has additionally been put in on greater than 50 million gadgets from the Google Play retailer.
© Thomson Reuters 2020
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