Josh, an Indian short video-sharing app like TikTok has raised more than $100 million from investors including Alphabet Inc’s Google and Microsoft, months after the Chinese app was banned in the country.
Josh is one of a few local short-video stages that have jumped up since India hindered the uncontrollably mainstream TikTok in June in the midst of an outskirt emergency with China, pulling in worldwide financial specialist interest in applications filling the gap.
Also read: India bans 59 Chinese apps including TikTok, Shareit, UC Browser citing national security
Bengaluru-based VerSe Innovation, which owns Josh, is valued at more than $1 billion following the investment, it said in a statement. Josh has crossed 50 million downloads on the Google Play store.
AlphaWave, a part of global asset manager Falcon Edge Capital, also invested in VerSe, as did existing investors Sofina Group and Lupa Systems, VerSe said, adding that it would use the funds to scale up Josh.
Google said the speculation is essential for its $10 billion (generally Rs. 73,900 crores) Google for India Digitisation Fund made to quicken India’s computerised economy.
“At the point when we shared subtleties of the India Digitization Fund in July this year, we distinguished empowering reasonable access and data for each Indian in their own language, regardless of whether it’s Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, and more as a critical column to drive forward India’s digitisation,” Google said in a blog entry.
VerSe also owns the 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.
Both Josh and Moj have been installed on more than 50 million devices each, according to data from Google’s Play Store.
Separately on Tuesday, Indian ad technology firm InMobi’s Glance – which runs an eponymous lock-screen content app and short-video platform Roposo – said it had raised $145 million from Google and existing investor Mithril Capital.
Google set aside $10 billion earlier this year for digital investments in India.
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