VerSe Innovation strengthens its leadership team with

 VerSe Innovation strengthens its leadership team with Sandip Basu’s appointment as
Group CFO

VerSe Innovation, India’s biggest local language technology platform appoints Sandip Basu as its Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO), effective immediately. Sandip is a deeply experienced business leader who over the past 30 years has led and built several businesses as a CEO and Group CFO. He has built high performing teams holding them to the highest standards of operational excellence and compliance. In his role as Group CFO, Sandip will work towards creating a world class finance function and team aligned with VerSe’s strategic objectives and vision.

Sandip’s appointment to an expanding leadership team at VerSe Innovation comes at a time where the unicorn is looking at an aggressive monetization strategy, expansion plans around its family of apps and extending its broad-based tech platforms across other international geographies to serve unmet content needs of local language audiences globally.

Sandip is a seasoned business leader and has worked with several distinguished firms like Bharti Telecom Limited, Fascel Limited, BPL Mobile Group, XCEL Telecom, Loop Mobile and Loop Telecom in the capacities of a CEO, MD and CFO. Sandip also founded Wise Apps which helped with virtual assurance and warranty products for electronic gadgets. He has worked on greenfield projects in sunrise industries with promoters and founders and has built compliance mechanisms to protect organizational and stakeholder interests. Sandip’s key financial domain knowledge and functional expertise have also gained him several opportunities to work closely and manage end to end engagements with key stakeholders like investors, shareholders, board and committee members, lenders, and various regulatory and statutory bodies. He is a Chartered and Cost Accountant by qualification.

Sandip Basu in his new role as Group CFO, VerSe Innovation, said, “I am humbled to start a new year, in a new role, with a new challenge to steer India’s largest content tech platform in its mission to bridge the digital divide. And with the explosion of digitisation, the scope has only just widened, and reality seems much closer. Having been an entrepreneur myself in the later part of my career, I appreciate the opportunity and responsibility as Group CFO to streamline the organization’s internal systems and processes and look forward to creating a world class finance team at VerSe. Viru and Umang are exceptional professional founders with enviable track records in their respective journeys and I look forward to working with them, as we aim to transform VerSe into a massively impactful company.”

Welcoming Sandip to VerSe Innovation, Founders Virendra Gupta and Umang Bedi said, “The past year has witnessed VerSe Innovation scale newer heights with tremendous growth and investments – a validation of our vision, our commitment and all our hard work. In Sandip we have found a trusted ally and we are secure in his ability to responsibly scale the business while strengthening stakeholder relationships under his stewardship. An accomplished leader, Sandip has had a ringside view of the evolution of the communication and technology landscape in India. There is nobody better suited for this role, in terms of experience, wisdom and foresight to reinforce and scale the platform, meeting global standards and turning it into a worldwide play.”

 

Josh conducts India’s biggest online

 Josh conducts India’s biggest online Antakshari on World Music Day

~top Bollywood singers Shaan, Ankit Tiwari, Neha Bhasin among others join ‘Let’s Play Antakshari’ on Josh to celebrate World Music Day 2021~

Josh – India’s fastest growing and most engaged short video app recently concluded #Let’sPlayAntakshari, the biggest Antakshari ever played in India on a digital platform, during the week of World Music Day 2021. Engaging creators and users across Bharat in a virtual celebration on the app, the online programme was hosted by renowned singer and comedian Sugandha Mishra and received participation from ace musicians and singers in the industry including Mika, Shaan, Neeti Mohan, Sukhbir, Ankit Tiwari, Salim-Sulaiman, Neha Bhasin, Mamta Sharma and Abhijeet Sawant.

Bharat’s all-time favourite musical game – Antakshari on Josh, brought together millions of musical souls from different parts of the country, while also giving followers and fans the opportunity to sing along or lip sync with their favourite Indian singers. The epitome of Bharat’s culture and heritage, Josh, with this campaign aimed at infusing every Indian’s heart with music while encouraging them to enjoy several underexplored genres of music like retro, sufi, romantic, emotional, blockbuster on the short-video platform. 

#Let’sPlayAntakshari that launched on June 21, 2021 ran till June 27, 2021 in a fun and highly engaging format. Every day, one iconic singer dropped a theme (say ‘Mausam’), a word (say Dil) or a letter (say ‘M’) on the platform inviting wide-range participation and videos from users and creators. What elevated the fun and set this one-week music extravaganza apart, was that thousands of users and creators across India shared exciting videos featuring themselves in duets with celebs. The app’s Antakshari special filter was a hit among users as it made them look and feel like a star. By the end of the high- octane campaign, #Let’sPlayAntakshari clocked spectacular engagement with over50,000 videos being uploaded by 12,000+ creators, garnering over 2.1 billion views on Josh. The top 5 winners of the online game were rewarded with cash prizes; the top 100 creators and top 100 UGC users were also gratified by the Josh team.

Umang Bedi, Co-Founder, Josh said, “In what has been indeed a challenging year for all of us, celebrations like these bring satisfaction to our hearts and evoke the spirit of oneness in us. While #LetsPlayAntakshari provided our audiences with a rich musical week, it was also a step towards Josh’s commitment in giving exposure to budding creators to collaborate with top level artists and showcase their talent. As the famous saying goes – ‘baithe baithe kya karein, karna hai kuch kaam, shuru kare antakshari leke prabhu ka naam’ – so we thought why not make use of this opportunity while staying safe at our homes!”

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 5 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 with 100 million downloads. Currently, Josh is the fastest growing and most engaged short-video app in India with 105 million MAUs (Monthly Active Users), 51 million DAUs (Daily Active Users) and 2+ billion video plays per day.

Josh teams up with Ministry of Ayush to

 Josh teams up with Ministry of Ayush to promote health and wellbeing

-Becomes first and only short video platform to be onboarded by the ministry-

-Celebrities like Virat Kohli and Anil Kapoor will come forward to raise awareness-

 Josh, India’s fastest growing and most-engaged short video app, welcomed the Ministry of Ayush on the platform. The ministry marks its debut as a short form content creator on Josh and will exclusively host this year’s campaign, ‘Be with Yoga, Be at Home’ for International Day of Yoga (June 21^st) on the Josh app. The collaboration aims at informing users about the Common Yoga Protocols and their multiple benefits- ranging from immunity enhancement and health promotion, to treating respiratory problems and curing stress issues, while amplifying the message to stay at home for their own safety.

With the collaboration, Josh looks forward to provide a fresh impetus to the centuries old practice of Ayurveda and yoga by leveraging bite-sized content. While eyeing the promotion of health and well-being in such difficult times, Josh will focus on propagating the rich heritage of yoga amongst its user base in a fun and exciting manner.

The Ministry of Ayush has been disseminating snackable videos, infographics, and all relevant information around Yoga as well as all-round health and wellbeing through its Josh profile. The videos will guide Josh’s user base on how to perform different asanas and will inform the community about the benefits of practicing yoga and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

To further support the campaign, Josh has commenced its #BeWithYogaBeAtHome challenge to encourage users to adopt this physical, mental, and spiritual practice. With the goal to encourage users to join in this thriving culture of yoga, Josh has also invited its creators and NGO partners to share their yoga videos for the benefit of the larger community on the platform.

Commending the initiative of Ministry of Ayush, Umang Bedi, Co-Founder, Josh said, “It is a great honor to be the partner of choice for the Ministry of Ayush as it kickstarts its IDY-2021 campaign. At Josh, we make every effort to create a safe space where millions who are isolated today, can unite over content that entertains but more importantly, rejuvenates the mind and spirit. We’re excited and committed to using the power of a social platform to amplify the ministry’s unrelenting efforts in promoting an ancient, tested and trusted practice of health and well-being.”

P.N. Ranjit Kumar, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Ayush said, “The Ministry thanks the Josh platform for supporting the ‘Be with Yoga, Be at Home’ initiative. We invite other media platforms also to partner this activity.”

Under this initiative, the Ministry of Ayush will post several videos on Josh to inform and educate the users about its campaign. Also, major celebrities like Virat Kohli, Anil Kapoor, Mary Kom, Shilpa Shetty and many more have come forward to support this campaign and will be sharing their encouraging advice on Josh through the ministry’s profile.

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 5 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 with 100 million downloads. Currently, Josh is the fastest growing and most engaged short-video app in India with over 99 million MAUs (Monthly Active Users), 48 million DAUs (Daily Active Users) and 2+ 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.

Dailyhunt gives fans a whistle-podu moment,

 Dailyhunt gives fans a whistle-podu moment,

brings exclusive content from Chennai Super Kings

~now win team merchandise in the CSK contest that launches on Josh, its leading short-video app~

 Dailyhunt, India’s #1 local language content discovery platform for Bharat, today announced CSK Originals – an exclusive and exciting content partnership with IPL favorites’ Chennai Super Kings. This partnership manifests as an exclusive hub on the Dailyhunt platform, giving users access to original CSK content packed with team photos, vignettes and videos. CSK Originals went live on Dailyhunt on 19^th September 2020 and will continue to entertain through a six-month duration until 30^th March 2021.

 Umang Bedi, Co-Founder, Dailyhunt said, “Sweet first victories deserve their attention and due. With spirits soaring high after their first game, we can’t think of a better way to salute Chennai Super Kings’ passion and never-say-die attitude – than bringing the best of cricket to the best in content.  This first-in-an-IPL opportunity is sure to be a fan favourite keeping users absolutely up to date and entertained.”

 Earlier this month, Dailyhunt also launched its made-in-India, short-video app ‘Josh’. Josh, a rich and diverse representation of India’s youth and the content that drives them, will allow short-video consumers and creators across Bharat to enjoy this collaboration too. The app (has) also launched a CSK contest on 28^th September 2020 to keep the user josh running high and wide. Winners of this contest stand the chance to win authentic CSK merchandise worth INR 1 lakh.

KS Viswanathan, CEO, CSK said, “This exciting partnership with Dailyhunt will enable exclusive CSK content reach far and wide. Being a franchise that values its fan base, we want our supporters to be up to date about the team.”