An Indian short-video sharing app, Josh, has raised more than $100 million from investors including Microsoft, and Google, in a growing space that further eats into TikTok’s market share.
Josh is one of several short video platforms have cropped up after India blocked the Chinese consumer data harvesting app in June. Josh has drawn global investor interest.
Following the investments from the tech giants, Bengaluru-based VerSe Innovation Josh’s parent, has been valued at more than $1 billion.
AlphaWave, which is part of global asset manager Falcon Edge Capital, has also backed VerSe, as did existing investors Sofina Group and Lupa Systems, said VerSe while adding that it would use the funds to scale up Josh.
Incidentally, VerSe also owns news and content platform Dailyhunt, which offers content in multiple Indian languages.
In September, Indian content-sharing platform ShareChat raised $40 million from investors including Twitter Inc and Lightspeed Ventures, in an effort to drive growth for its new short-video app Moj.
According to Google’s Play Store, Moj and Josh have been installed on more than 50 million devices each.
