VerSe Innovation is a local language tech company that designs and develops a platform for consumption and socialization with media. The platform facilitates user performance tracks and content curation through recommendation and vertical search tools, thus is able to provide users with personalized content and notifications.
The funding round was led by Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’), Luxor Capital, and Sumeru Ventures as well as existing backers Sofina Group and Baillie Gifford also took part in the round. It is the largest round in the Indian startup ecosystem this year.
VerSe Innovation, India, was founded by Umang Bedi and Virendra Gupta in 2007. As of now, the company operates three apps. One of them is Josh which has more than 150 million users, the third part of them creates and publishes content. Another app is Dailyhunt, a news aggregator, operating in 15 languages and partnering with over 100 000 content partners. It has more than 350 million users. And the newly launched app – PublicVibe – with 5 million monthly active users. “A data point that I can share with you is that there are 400 advertisers in India with whom we have full-funnel integration with their third-party mobile measurement platforms. We are not dependent on certain advertisers. 50% of our advertisers are enterprises and the rest are small businesses across tier 2, 3, and 4 India,” Umang Bedi.
