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BENGALURU: The Indian father or mother of a TikTok copycat has raised greater than $100 million from buyers together with Alphabet Inc’s Google and Microsoft , months after the Chinese language-owned short-video app was banned within the nation.
The app, Josh, is one in every of a number of home-grown short-video platforms which have sprung up because the authorities blocked the wildly standard TikTok in June amidst a border disaster with China, attracting world investor curiosity in functions filling the hole.
Bengaluru-based VerSe Innovation, which owns Josh, is valued at greater than $1 billion following the funding, it stated in an announcement.
AlphaWave, part of world asset supervisor Falcon Edge Capital, additionally invested in VerSe, as did current buyers Sofina Group and Lupa Techniques, VerSe stated, including that it might use the funds to scale up Josh.
VerSe additionally owns information and content material platform Dailyhunt, which gives content material in a number of Indian languages.
In September, the content-sharing platform ShareChat raised $40 million from buyers together with Twitter Inc and Lightspeed Ventures, in an effort to drive progress for its new short-video app Moj.
Each Josh and Moj have been put in on greater than 50 million gadgets every, in response to knowledge from Google’s Play Retailer.
Individually on Tuesday, advert expertise agency InMobi’s Look – which runs an eponymous lock-screen content material app and short-video platform Roposo – stated it had raised $145 million from Google and current investor Mithril Capital.
Google put aside $10 billion earlier this 12 months for digital investments in India.
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