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India’s TikTok equivalent secures US$805 million in funding

FILE PHOTO: Geetha Sridha, 54, makes a video with her daughter Sarada Sridhar, that will upload on an Indian short video app, in Mumbai, India, July 1, 2020. REUTERS/Hemanshi Kamani/

If you want to start an app, what’s the typical journey? Get the idea, get it validated, launch it and grow it, right? Well, when a hugely popular app gets banned in your country, you’ve essentially had another company help you check off the first two phases. This is essentially what happened with TikTok in India.

Four days after TikTok was banned in the country, an Indian short video social media platform named Josh was launched. Its parent company just received US$805 million in funding, the country’s largest venture capital round this year, which takes the company’s valuation to about US$5 billion.

Key comments:

“VerSe will be profitable within the next two or three years,” said Virendra Gupta, founder of VerSe, the parent company of the Josh app.

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