Startup Deep Dive : VerSe Innovation — the news app that quietly funded the TikTok-ban unicorn

In 2016, Virendra Gupta looked at the local-language internet exploding across small-town India and realised he had played it too safe. “I was not prepared. That was my big failure,” he said later, describing the moment his own bet on rural India nearly missed its own boom. Six years on, the company he refused to give up on, VerSe Innovation, was valued at $5 billion (₹480,000 crore) — even as it burned through more than ₹2,500 crore in a single year to get there.

VerSe is the parent of Dailyhunt, India’s local-language news aggregator, and Josh, the short-video app born the week TikTok was banned. Between them the two apps have raised more than $1.5 billion from CPP Investments, Google, Microsoft, Sofina and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, reached a peak valuation of $5 billion, and still have not told the public they have turned a profit. This is the story of how a 2007 SMS-alerts business became one of India’s most heavily funded consumer internet companies — and why, nearly two decades in, “when does this become a real business” is still the only question that matters.

Quick facts

What they do

VerSe Innovation sells two things to two very different audiences. To roughly a few hundred million Indians who read news in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi and eleven other Indian languages, it sells Dailyhunt — a news and content aggregator that licenses stories from more than 50,000 publishers and creators and delivers them, ad-supported, as a single feed. To a younger, entertainment-hungry audience, it sells Josh, a short-video app built in the image of TikTok, for watching and making 15-to-90-second videos in Indian languages. Both apps monetise the same way at the core: they hold attention, and they sell that attention, at scale, to advertisers who want reach beyond India’s English-speaking metros — the “Bharat” audience that Facebook, Google and Netflix have always found harder to serve directly.

The origin

Virendra Gupta spent a decade in telecom — at BPL Mobile, Bharti Cellular, Trilogy and OnMobile — before he left corporate life at 36. He started VerSe Innovations in 2007 with roughly $1 million in seed funding from OnMobile, on a narrow but stubborn insight: hundreds of millions of Indians outside the big cities had a mobile phone but no way to get useful information — jobs, matrimony listings, property, exam results — in a language they actually read. VerSe built that as a B2B SMS and USSD alerts business, serving telecom operators across India, Bangladesh and Africa, and it was profitable doing it. The consumer internet business that made VerSe famous did not exist yet.

The struggle years

The pivot that created Dailyhunt was, by Gupta’s own account, an irrational-looking bet. In 2011, VerSe acquired Eterno Infotech, the maker of a small Symbian news app called Newshunt, and pushed it toward Android at a time when almost nobody in India was reading local-language news on a smartphone — the market for it barely existed. Gupta rebranded the product Dailyhunt in 2015, once smartphones and cheap data started spreading beyond metro India.

But being early cost VerSe the next inflection. By 2016, the local-language internet was growing far faster than Gupta had modelled, and he had deliberately kept the company capital-efficient rather than throwing money at growth. “I was not prepared. That was my big failure,” he admitted afterward — a rare founder concession that the company’s caution, not its ambition, was the mistake that let rivals close the gap.

The second, more expensive struggle came later and was financial rather than strategic. In FY22, as VerSe poured capital into the short-video war against ShareChat’s Moj, its net loss jumped 3.17 times year-on-year to ₹2,563 crore on revenue of just ₹965 crore — meaning the company was spending roughly ₹3.85 to earn every rupee of revenue, largely on customer acquisition and a one-time ₹375 crore cash settlement of employee stock options. Three years later, in April 2025, auditor Deloitte’s clean-but-qualified opinion on VerSe’s FY24 accounts flagged control weaknesses in vendor payments — including a vendor claiming ₹35 crore of invoices VerSe could not verify in its own books — and in how the company tracked “virtual assets,” the in-app gifting tokens tied to Josh’s creator-payout economy. VerSe followed that, in May 2025, with its first major layoff in over two years: roughly 350 roles cut as part of what the company called a shift toward AI-driven operations.

The turning point

The single event that turned VerSe from a mid-sized content company into a global-investor darling was not one it created: on 29 June 2020, the Indian government banned TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps. VerSe had a short-video product, Josh, in market within weeks, riding the same wave that lifted ShareChat’s Moj and Instagram Reels. The numbers on either side of that one event are stark. Before the ban, Dailyhunt was a respected but unglamorous regional app; VerSe had never publicly crossed a $1 billion valuation. Within eight months — by February 2021 — a fresh round led by Qatar Investment Authority and Glade Brook Capital, on top of more than $100 million from Google and Microsoft in December 2020, had pushed VerSe past unicorn status, with Josh already reporting 85 million monthly active users, 40 million of them daily, and 1.5 billion video plays a day. By April 2022, Josh had grown to roughly 150 million monthly active users, and VerSe had raised $805 million more at a $5 billion valuation. A single regulatory decision, in other words, turned a decade-old also-ran into one of India’s five most valuable startups in under two years.

The money behind it

VerSe’s capital table reads like a list of the world’s most patient institutional money. Google first backed the company in December 2020, alongside Microsoft, in a round that also crossed the unicorn line — a strategic vote from two Big Tech companies for an Indian-language content play neither could easily build in-house. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and CPP Investments — Canada’s two giant pension funds — came in as the company scaled: CPP Investments alone put in $375 million in the April 2022 round after an earlier $50 million cheque, calling VerSe a bet on “high-growth digital consumer platforms in India.” Sofina, the Belgian holding company, has backed VerSe since its earlier funding rounds and topped up its stake in 2022 alongside Baillie Gifford, betting on the local-language content thesis over several rounds rather than one.

Across its life, VerSe has raised at least $1.5 billion in disclosed rounds — from a ₹1,000 million Series B in 2014 through smaller Series C–F rounds (Falcon Capital, ByteDance, Falcon Edge Capital, Stonebridge Capital) to the $100 million-plus round of December 2020–February 2021, the $450 million round of August 2021 that valued the company near $3 billion, and the $805 million round of April 2022 that took it to $5 billion — a figure confirmed independently by CPP Investments’ own announcement and by BusinessToday’s and YourStory’s contemporaneous reporting. (Notably, one of VerSe’s own Series D backers in 2016 was ByteDance — the company whose banned app, TikTok, VerSe’s Josh would go on to compete against four years later.) VerSe has not announced a new primary-market valuation since April 2022; the $5 billion figure remains its last publicly confirmed one.

How it makes money

The plumbing is simple even if the products look different. Dailyhunt licenses content from tens of thousands of publishers and creators, serves it inside a single feed, and sells display and video advertising against that attention — a conventional digital-publishing model. Josh runs the same advertising model on video, plus a creator economy layered on top: creators earn from a mix of ad revenue share and in-app virtual gifting, where viewers buy virtual coins and send them to creators, and VerSe (per Deloitte’s FY24 audit findings) takes a cut of that gifting flow — the same “virtual assets” line the auditor flagged for weak financial controls.

On top of that base, VerSe has spent the last two years trying to add higher-margin revenue: NexVerse.ai, its in-house AI-driven programmatic advertising engine (built using data from its 2024 acquisition of performance-marketing firm ValueLeaf), aims to sell ad inventory more efficiently across both apps; and Dailyhunt Premium, a subscription bundle launched with digital-magazine platform Magzter, is VerSe’s first meaningful attempt to make readers, not just advertisers, pay directly. The part most outside observers get wrong is assuming Josh is the bigger earner because it is the flashier product: reporting compiled by Inc42 put Josh’s contribution at only around ₹300 crore of VerSe’s roughly ₹1,456 crore FY23 topline, even though the short-video business consumed the majority of VerSe’s investor capital. Dailyhunt’s older, less glamorous advertising business has consistently carried the group’s revenue.

The numbers

VerSe’s revenue and losses have moved through three distinct phases: a funding-fuelled loss spike in FY22, aggressive cost-cutting through FY23–24, and a return to steep revenue growth in FY25. Figures below are drawn from company filings as reported by Entrackr and StartupTalky; where reporting scope changed between disclosures (operating revenue versus total revenue including other income, and standalone versus post-acquisition consolidated figures), both are noted.

Two things stand out. First, the FY22-to-FY24 period was a genuine reset: revenue nearly stagnated while losses were cut by more than two-thirds, largely by slashing business-promotion spend — from ₹969 crore in FY23 to ₹339 crore in FY24, a 65% cut — and cost of services by 17%. Second, FY25’s 88% operating-revenue jump was not organic alone: it was boosted by consolidating newly acquired Magzter and ValueLeaf, since VerSe’s own standalone revenue (stripping out acquisitions) grew a more modest, but still healthy, 33% to ₹1,373 crore.

Where the money comes from

VerSe does not publish a clean, audited revenue split between Dailyhunt and Josh, but the reporting that exists points to a consistent, and slightly counterintuitive, pattern: the news app, not the short-video app, has carried the group’s revenue. Inc42’s analysis of FY23 filings found Josh contributed only around ₹300 crore of the year’s roughly ₹1,456 crore in revenue — barely a fifth — even after absorbing the bulk of VerSe’s investor capital during the TikTok-ban land grab. The surprise, in other words, is not that Dailyhunt makes money and Josh does not; it’s how far the gap between capital deployed and revenue generated has been between the two apps. Geographically, the entire business is concentrated in India’s non-English, non-metro “Bharat” market — VerSe’s original 2007 thesis — with almost no reported revenue from outside India, unlike more geographically diversified Indian internet peers.

The risks

Three risks sit on top of VerSe’s own disclosures rather than speculation. First, advertising concentration: with subscription revenue (Dailyhunt Premium) and adtech (NexVerse.ai) both newly launched and unproven at scale, the overwhelming majority of VerSe’s revenue still depends on digital advertising budgets, which move with the broader economy and compete directly against Google and Meta for the same rupee. Second, internal financial controls: Deloitte’s FY24 audit opinion, while ultimately clean, explicitly flagged weaknesses in vendor payment verification and in controls over the “virtual assets” used in Josh’s creator-gifting economy — a disclosed, not alleged, control gap that increases the risk of future restatements. Third, competitive attention risk in short video: Josh competes directly with ShareChat’s Moj, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, two of which are distributed by companies with vastly larger balance sheets and no separate short-video P&L to defend — meaning VerSe cannot simply outspend them the way it did in 2020–2022.

The takeaway

VerSe’s arc is a reminder that being early and being ready are not the same thing — Gupta built the right product for local-language India years before the market existed, and still nearly missed the moment it did, because caution and conviction were pulling in opposite directions. The larger lesson for any founder chasing a regulatory tailwind, as VerSe did after the TikTok ban, is that the capital a crisis attracts is not the same as the business model that outlasts it: five years after Josh’s launch, the app that the ban created is still worth less to the balance sheet than the older, unglamorous news product the company almost gave up perfecting.

Frequently asked questions

What does VerSe Innovation own?

VerSe Innovation is the parent company of Dailyhunt, a local-language news and content aggregator, and Josh, a short-video app. It also owns adtech platform NexVerse.ai and digital-marketing firm ValueLeaf, and runs Dailyhunt Premium, a subscription product built with Magzter.

Who founded VerSe Innovation and who runs it now?

Virendra Gupta founded VerSe Innovation in 2007. Umang Bedi, formerly head of Facebook India, joined as president in early 2018 and became co-founder in 2020; he is now the company’s co-founder and CEO.

How much is VerSe Innovation worth?

VerSe was last valued at $5 billion in its April 2022 funding round, when it raised $805 million from investors including CPP Investments, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Sofina. No fresh valuation has been publicly disclosed since.

Is VerSe Innovation profitable?

Not yet, as far as public disclosures show. It reported a net loss of ₹814.8 crore in FY24, down 56% from FY23, and an EBITDA loss of ₹738 crore in FY25, down 20% year-on-year. The company has said it is targeting group-level EBITDA break-even in the second half of FY26.

Why did VerSe Innovation launch Josh?

Josh launched within weeks of the Indian government’s June 2020 ban on TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps, entering the short-video gap the ban created — the same opportunity ShareChat’s Moj and Instagram Reels also moved into.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• CPP Investments, “CPP Investments Announces US$425 Million Investment in VerSe Innovation,” April 2022
• BusinessToday, “VerSe Innovation raises $805 mn; valuation zooms to $5 bn,” April 2022
• YourStory, “Dailyhunt parent VerSe Innovation raises $805M,” April 2022
• TechCrunch, “Dailyhunt and Josh’s parent firm raises over $100 million,” February 2021
• Entrackr, “Dailyhunt’s parent posts Rs 2,500 Cr loss in FY22; revenue stands at Rs 965 Cr,” November 2022
• Inc42, “DailyHunt & Josh Parent VerSe Innovation’s Loss Widens 3.2X YoY To INR 2,563 Cr In FY22,” 2022
• Entrackr, “VerSe cuts burn by 51% in FY24, eyes profitability in H2 CY25,” 2025
• StartupTalky, “VerSe Innovation, Parent Company of Dailyhunt, Being Investigated for Audit Findings,” April 2025
• Entrackr, “VerSe Innovation revenue jumps 88% in FY25; eyes profitability in H2 FY26,” September 2025
• ANI / The Wire, “VerSe Innovation achieves 88% Revenue Growth; Cuts Burn by 20%,” September 2025
• Entrackr, “VerSe to lay off 350 employees amid strategic AI investment,” May 2025
• Forbes India, “DailyHunt, Josh: How to give in to your compulsive idea, Virendra Gupta style”
• Wikipedia, “Dailyhunt” (founding, funding timeline, ByteDance investment)
• Wikipedia, “Josh (app)” (launch date, funding rounds, user numbers)
• Inc42, “VerSe Innovation Hits Reset: AI Pivot, Layoffs & A Shrinking Josh” (segment revenue split, historical narrative)

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