VerSe Innovation, India’s First Unicorn in Tech for

 VerSe Innovation, India’s First Unicorn in Tech for Local Languages Acquires Photo-and-Video Sharing App Vebbler, its second acquisition in 2 weeks

 ~The camera-first, interest-based community platform brings AI based neural art filters & tools to Josh~

~VerSe Innovation recently acquired AI-startup Cognirel Technologies~

VerSe Innovation, India’s biggest local language technology platform, announced that it has acquired Vebbler, an interest-based community-focused photo and video sharing app launched by Sahil Bhagat. This is the second acquisition in two weeks for VerSe Innovation who recently acquired AI-startup Cognirel Technologies. With the acquisition of Vebbler, the company which recently emerged as India’s first tech unicorn for local languages, advances in its mission to build the largest digital media platform that serves unmet content needs of millions of consumers using technology.

 

Speaking on the acquisition, VerSe Innovation Founder Virendra Gupta and Co-Founder Umang Bedi, said, “The combination of Vebbler’s product capabilities with our platform will improve our ability to drive innovation around the camera and social engagement and play a more meaningful role in capturing the mindshare, timeshare, and revenue share of Bharat’s local language users. We have every intent to make good on our investor and consumer confidence and will continue to build and acquire powerful tools and technologies that deliver products which are consumer-focused and content-forward. We welcome the Vebbler team and look forward to creating an exciting future together.”

 

Vebbler lets people join groups called ‘clubs’ and share photos and videos around different interests, whether it’s fashion, travel, photography or entertainment. With over 100+ categories, users create content using Vebbler’s camera, packed with superior creation tools such as AI-based neural-art filters, effects, stickers, GIFs, drawing tools and fonts along with proprietary technology on video processing and editing. Leveraging Vebbler’s camera and community  will give Josh a powerful differentiator in the market and present millions of Josh users the additional opportunity to harness India’s diverse creativity and talent.   

Sahil Bhagat, Founder, Vebbler also shares, “My vision with Vebbler was to build a video first social media platform out of India. Our use case, domain understanding, technology expertise is unique in the Indian market. In VerSe Innovation’s vision, we find strategic synergies between Josh and Vebbler. This deal speaks volumes to the value and quality of our product. We are extremely excited to work together and inch closer to our shared vision of building a global product with Josh.”

 

Vebbler was backed initially by actors Dino Morea and Nikhil Chinapa. Originally, Vebbler was designed as a private way to share photos and videos with friends in real-time at events, such as holidays, weddings and concerts, which then pivoted into an interest-based network in 2018.

In the last three months, Josh, has attracted over a $200M+ investment from global marquee investors such as Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar, and Glade Brook Capital Partners, along with Google, Microsoft, and AlphaWave (a unit of Falcon Edge Capital).

Josh is a made-in-India, short-video app launched in September 2020 by VerSe Innovation. It represents a confluence of India’s top 200+ best creators, the 10 biggest music labels, 15+ million UGC creators, best in class content creation tools, the hottest entertainment formats, and formidable user demographics. Josh has been consistently rated as the leading Indian short-video app in India on the Play store. Currently, Josh is the fastest growing and most engaged short-video app in India with over 85 million MAUs (Monthly Active Users), 40 million DAUs (Daily Active Users) and 1.5+ billion video plays per day.

VerSe Innovation makes first acquisition as a Unicorn with

  VerSe Innovation makes first acquisition as a Unicorn with AI-startup Cognirel Technologies

Brings on board Cognirel Founder & Quillpad-creator Ram Prakash to head its AI Lab

 

VerSe Innovation, India’s biggest local language technology platform, announced that it has acquired Cognirel Technologies, a Bengaluru-based AI solutions provider. VerSe will bring on board Cognirel Founder Ram Prakash to head its newly instituted AI Lab.

This acquisition bolsters VerSe’s commitment to creating cutting-edge digital capabilities to serve the emerging content needs of millions of consumers using technology. Today, VerSe Innovation’s proprietary technology platform powers 300 million + users to consume content in their local language on Dailyhunt. Its technology also powers its short video app Josh, which is India’s #1 and most engaging app in this category. The AI Lab will focus on enhancing and developing state of the art models through computer vision and Deep Learning innovations for understanding video content in terms of their visual, audio, semantic and socio-linguistic aspects to enable better user recommendations and experiences on existing platforms, while also working on fundamental research that pushes the frontiers in AI & ML as it reshapes India’s content landscape. The AI Lab will aggressively pursue neuroscience-inspired RL experiments to understand user taste-profiles, using non-intrusive, implicit behavioural signals, with the goal of boosting engagement and utility for the users.

Welcoming Ram Prakash and his team of scientists into the fold, VerSe Innovation Founder Virendra Gupta and Co-founder Umang Bedi shared, “We are inspired by Ram’s deep curiosity and understanding of India’s language landscape. His achievements in the field of AI & ML precede him, and he comes armed with an exceptional team and the expertise that we believe will create true impact for local language users through the reach and scale of Dailyhunt and Josh. We are very proud of the momentum on VerSe and with this acquisition, we move a step further on our strategic expansion path for our family of apps focused on Bharat. With Ram at the helm of our AI & ML Lab, we also feel confident in our ambitions of taking our products into digitally emerging markets across the world which have very distinct local characteristics.”

Ram Prakash H, in his new role as Head – VerSe Innovation AI Lab, shared, “AI & ML has been my passion for two decades now. When I created Quillpad, a first of its kind ML-based transliteration tool for Indian languages, I saw a unique opportunity in applying state-of-the-art advances in AI & ML to Indian languages. The best of AI/ML approaches today can’t be readily applied to Indian languages without the availability of high quality labelled data - multiply that with the number of languages we have and the problem is exponentially compounded. Current approaches are data-hungry and for solving Indian language NLP/NLU tasks, we don’t have labelled data. Our languages are inherently different from English, but linguistically well understood. We can leverage that. We will employ hybrid approaches that combine DL-based cross-lingual transfer learning techniques with classical computational linguistics models to alleviate the need for large labelled data. Dailyhunt and Josh ecosystems provide a great platform to do fundamental AI work, at scale, with live raw data pouring in by the seconds. It will be exciting to build solutions to make sense of all that.”

This technology-led acquisition of Cognirel is VerSe’s first since becoming a Unicorn in December 2020. Earlier this month, VerSe Innovation raised $100 million+ in a funding round led by global investors Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar and Glade Brook Capital Partners, close on the heels of a $100 million+ fundraise in December last year led by Alpha Wave, Google and Microsoft.