New Delhi: Months after the Central government banned a number of Chinese apps citing threat to national security, media reports on Tuesday surfaced that the parent of a TikTok copycat from India has raised more than $100 million from investors including Alphabet Inc’s Google and Microsoft.
Called as Josh, the copy cat app is one of several home-grown short-video platforms that have come up since the government blocked TikTok in June amidst a border crisis with China.
Reports further suggested that Bengaluru-based VerSe Innovation, which owns Josh, is valued at more than $1 billion following the investment.
As per reports, AlphaWave, a part of global asset manager Falcon Edge Capital, has also invested in VerSe along with other investors such as Sofina Group and Lupa Systems. VerSe said in a statement that it also owns news and content platform Dailyhunt, which offers content in multiple Indian languages.
Apart from Josh, another Indian content-sharing platform ShareChat had in September this year raised $40 million from investors including Twitter Inc and Lightspeed Ventures to drive growth for its new short-video app Moj.
Notably, these two apps — Josh and Moj — have been installed on more than 50 million devices each, according to data from Google’s Play Store.
However, Google also announced the investment in VerSe, and said it had invested in mobile advertising technology firm InMobi, which runs lock-screen content app Glance and short-video app Roposo.