Recently on Tuesday, Google Inc. has announced to invest in multiple Indian media-related start-ups to give a boost to Indian technology under its India Digitisation Fund which was revealed this year.
Google has announced to invest in Verse Innovation, the parent organisation of daily news and content aggregator platform, DailyHunt. Another platform that Google invested in is Glance, the social media subsidiary of InMobi Group.
DailyHunt, as mentioned is an Indian-based content and news aggregator that offers its users content in their preferred regional language. The platform supports up to 14 local languages from different content sources.
The investment will serve across various applications owned by Verse innovations including Josh, the short-video platform. DailyHunt has recently confirmed that it has concluded its USD 100 million Venture round with participation from Google Inc., Microsoft, Belgium-based investment firm, Sofina, U.S.-based Venture Capital firm, Falcon Edge Capital and Lupa Systems, according to CrunchBase.
Furthermore, with the inclusion of its last funding round of $100 million, DailyHunt has reached a valuation mark of $1 billion, making the company a Unicorn Club member.
The start-up was found back in 2009 by Chandu Sohoni and Umesh Kulkarni and is co-run by former Facebook India head, Umang Bedi, according to a report by TechCrunch.
Bedi plans to deploy part of this fresh infused funding into Josh app to scale up its operations. The company has planned to use the latest funding in the development of a larger content creator ecosystem, making advancements and innovations in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technology. Besides this, DailyHunt plans to utilise these funds in the augmentation of regional language content offerings and the growth of Josh app which is referred to as the ‘Made-in-India-for-India short-video platform’.
Why this investment from Google? Well, the answer to this is Google’s recently announced Digitisation Fund. CEO Sundar Pichai and Google Inc. have promised India to invest a total sum of $10 billion in the country over the next few years. This investment is a part of the search engine company’s plan to accelerate the adoption of digital services in the overseas market.
Before this investment, Google has cut a cheque of $4.5 billion from this fund to India’s largest telecom giant, Reliance Jio which is led by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani.
As we are aware that India is going through a digitisation wave which was significantly boosted during the COVID-19 induced nation-wide lockdowns and Google is capitalising on this opportunity by investing in its growth potential for the future.
