By Nishant Arora

New Delhi, Apr 11 (IANS): Leading local language technology platform VerSe Innovation, the owner of DailyHunt and Josh, is all set to enter the world of Web 3.0 and enable local, vernacular content creators monetise in the realm of metaverse, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Blockchain and more.

Umang Bedi, Co-founder, VerSe Innovation, told IANS on Monday that in the next couple of weeks, the company, which now has a valuation of $5 billion after raising $805 million last week, will make a very detailed announcement in the Web 3.0 space.

"With the Web 3.0 platform, we will further enable the creator ecosystem -- large, medium and small creators -- in India as another way to help them monetise. We are focused on helping creators make more money and help them grow across multiple genres," Bedi told IANS.

The time, he stressed, has come for Indian companies to really be able to showcase and build globally relevant businesses.

"I think there's a huge opportunity now to compete and create a new market in Web 3.0. This is the endeavour we are seeking and yearning but, of course, we don't have the proof points yet," Bedi noted.

Hopefully a year down the line, once the platforms are launched, "we'll be able to say where we are on the journey", he added.

Giving a much-needed boost to the Indian startup growth story, VerSe Innovation last week announced it has raised $805 million from global investors, taking its valuation to $5 billion.

VerSe Innovation, which owns popular short-video platform Josh and local language content platform Dailyhunt, has raised $1.5 billion in the past year.

The investment will be focused on strengthening its leadership position as the largest, fastest growing local language AI driven content platform in the country.

According to Bedi, they were the first ones to crack the code in the Indian vernacular language content market.

"Asia, Latin America, developed Europe -- these are all local language markets with local language characteristics. What we have built are successful local language based data science and machine learning models. We believe that there are definite synergies to export the local learnings and serve a large market," Bedi told IANS.

VerSe plans on both deepening and broadening its AI/ML and data science capabilities to further cement its leadership position across all user, engagement and retention metrics, drive deeper monetisation including influencers, e-commerce and live streaming and forays into Web 3.0 experiences.

It currently has a local language creator base of over 50 million creators as well as its local language content ecosystem which experiences over 80 billion video plays per month.

With Web 3.0 platform, "you will have the ability to monetise your content and experiences in an efficient way", Bedi added.

"I think over time, you would extend those experiences to brands as well to connect with their audiences. And over time, brands will enter into a truly virtual metaverse experience," he added.

VerSe is perhaps the only company in the Indian vernacular language space that has cracked the code of user growth, engagement and monetisation at scale.

Josh currently has over 150 million MAUs (monthly active users) while Dailyhunt serves over 350 million users every month, offering content in 15 languages from a licensed creator ecosystem of over 100,000 content partners and individual content creators.

Another app ‘PublicVibe' from the company serves over 5 million monthly active users (MAUs) and 1 million daily active users (DAUs) and has over 6 million downloads on the Play Store.